The OCG Blog
Welcome to ONCALL Group’s first blog. We hope you find these posts interesting, informative, sometimes funny, sometimes it may even be sad.
There are many, many technology blogs out there. Some are good, some are not. From time to time we may re-post someone else’s blog, just because it was so good!
Meanwhile, I love the way there is nothing new in the world – even Big Data, BYOD and ‘new paradigms’ for ‘ubiquitous computing’ were thought of centuries ago, … have you ever come across the story of ‘When the Waters Were Changed’? Sometimes IT can be like that.
In the story, mankind is warned that all the water in the world which had not been specially hoarded would disappear. It would then be renewed, with different water, which would drive men mad.
If you’ve been around IT for a while (let’s say more than a year) you’ve probably seen the water change a few times already. Only one man listened, in the story, and he hoards water and hides it away. Eventually the streams stop running, the wells go dry, and the man who had listened goes to his retreat and drinks his preserved water. Ever been a specialist in a particular programming language, Operating System, or some ‘latest’ technology; only to find that you wake up one morning and everything you know is suddenly out of date?
The man who listened sees the water returning again and comes out of hiding and tries to take his place in society. But everyone else is different. They think and talk differently. When he tries to talk to them, he realises they think he’s mad. They don’t understand him. They either show hostility or compassion.
So what does he do? Well at first he sticks to his plan. He drinks none of the new water, and draws on his own supplies. But that soon gets tough. He can’t bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from everyone else.
So he drinks the new water. He becomes like the rest. He forgets all about his own store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been restored to sanity.
There’ve been a few changes lately.
IT as a utility is gathering pace. Is it in the Cloud? How do you cope with Big Data? What’s your BYOD policy? Does this water taste different to you?
I got this from ‘Tales of the Dervishes’ by Idries Shah, who attributes it to Dhun-Nun, the Egyptian (died 860)