Re: I would love to see their service engineering docs
Engineer: Well, we capped it at eleven nines before for an event that has a likelihood of occurring once in a hundred billion years, like the sun going red giant on us. That would mean that our geographically redundant system wouldn't help much.
Marketer: What would you need to add some nines to that number?
Engineer: Well, we already added one last time on the assumption that we'd have travel outside the solar system by that point, so a really cataclysmic thing would only happen one in ten times a star destroys all its planets. And because you wouldn't stop badgering us. So we can't really--
Marketer: [interrupting] We need something new to distinguish our new product from our old product.
Engineer: Well, it costs less. How about that?
Marketer: But it's also better, right?
Engineer: We already have tapes with redundant copies stored in libraries on six continents, in a total of eighty nine datacenters, in order to let me sleep soundly with all the nines we have now. So we did open a few more datacenters to store the tapes, but not really enough to make the number any longer. Also adding more nines would be pretty pointless.
Marketer: I give up. We'll think it over and see what can be done.
Accountant: Just slap two more nines on the number; it's meaningless anyway. We haven't listened to the engineers for years. They still think we have eighty something datacenters all over the world.
Marketer: What do we actually have?
Accountant: A warehouse in South Dakota.
Marketer: So our real level of reliability is?
Accountant: It's a pretty good warehouse. Maybe 99.9% or so.
Marketer: What happens when people find out?
Accountant: I'm still paying that engineer, the one who's in charge of and thus responsible for our entire glacier system, aren't I? Don't worry, I've covered every contingency. Our employment and liability is 99.999999999999% secure.
Marketer: I should probably quit before something happens, right?