A moment later, Amy looked up to se

A moment later, Amy looked up to see Charlie Moody, the senior manager of the server
administration team, walking briskly down the hall. He was being trailed by three of his senior technicians as
he made a beeline from his office to the door of the server room where the company servers were kept in a
controlled environment. They all looked worried.
Just then, Amy's screen beeped to alert her of a new e-mail. She glanced down. It beeped again—and
again. It started beeping constantly. She clicked on the envelope icon and, after a short delay, the mail window
opened. She had 47 new e-mails in her inbox. She opened one from Davey Martinez, an acquaintance from
the Accounting Department. The subject line said, Wait till you see this. The message body read, Look what
this has to say about our managers' salaries...Davey often sent her interesting and funny e-mails, and she failed
to notice that the file attachment icon was unusual before she clicked it.
Her PC showed the hourglass pointer icon for a second and then the normal pointer reappeared.
Nothing happened. She clicked the next e-mail message in the queue. Nothing happened. Her phone rang
again. She clicked the ISIS icon on her computer desktop to activate the call management software and
activated her headset. ‚Hello, Tech Support, how can I help you?‛ She couldn't greet the caller by name
because ISIS had not responded.
‚Hello, this is Erin Williams in receiving.‛
Amy glanced down at her screen. Still no ISIS. She glanced up to the tally board and was surprised to
see the inbound-call-counter tallying up waiting calls like digits on a stopwatch. Amy had never seen so many
calls come in at one time.
‚Hi, Erin,‛ Amy said. ‚What's up?‛
‚Nothing,‛ Erin answered. ‚That's the problem."‛The rest of the call was a replay of Bob's, except
that Amy had to jot notes down on a legal pad. She couldn't dispatch the deskside support team either. She
looked at the tally board. It had gone dark. No numbers at all.
Then she saw Charlie running down the hall from the server room. He didn't look worried anymore.
He looked frantic.
Amy picked up the phone again. She wanted to check with her supervisor about what to do now.
There was no dial tone.