One morning, as Michael Sacco was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been logged out of the World of Warcraft. He lay on his muscular back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his cheap no-name LCD monitor lit up from across the room. From this height the monitor, just about ready to turn off completely, showed Sindragosa's skeletal figure on the login screen. His monitor, pitifully underpowered compared to the rest of his electronics, flickered lazily before his eyes.

"What's happened to me," he thought. It was no dream. His room, a proper room for a human being, only somewhat too small, lay quietly between the four well-known walls. Above the table, on which an unfinished collection of WoW Insider articles was spread out -- Sacco was a blogger -- hung the picture which he had cut out of an illustrated magazine a little while ago and set in a pretty gilt frame. It was a picture of a blood elf male in full Bloodfang regalia. He stood boldly there, lifting up in the direction of the viewer a pair of epic daggers.

Michael's glance then turned to the breaking news window. The downtime alert -- that all realms would be down for scheduled maintenance on March 24th from 5 AM to 11 AM PST -- made him quite melancholy. "Why don't I keep sleeping for a little while longer and forget all this foolishness," he thought. But this was entirely impractical, for he was used to playing when he woke up, but in the servers' present state he could not get himself into the game. No matter how hard he clicked "Login", he always was kicked back to the login screen. He must have tried it a hundred times, closing his eyes so that he would not have to see the error window, and gave up only when he began to feel a light, dull pain in his temples which he had never felt before. It was his girlfriend, who indeed existed at this hour of the morning, nagging him to clean the litterbox and get writing.

"O God," he thought, "what a demanding job I've chosen!"

Tags: alert, downtime, maintenance, server, servers

Filed under: News items