Did you hear the one about the Texas couple who spent seven years paying for an alarm system that never worked? It’s easy to blame the vendor (especially since it’s Comcast) since 1) the system was not correctly installed and 2) when the homeowner noticed, the customer support agent said the system hadn’t reported in since 2007. Certainly Comcast shoulders a lot of the blame. After some pressure, they agreed to refund the full seven years worth of payments. However, the Leeson family is responsible as well. In seven years of paying for an alarm system, they apparently never tested it themselves.
A service that is never tested does not exist. If you don’t test it when you don’t need it, you can’t count on it being available when you do. It’s why emergency managers test outdoor warning sirens. It’s why hospitals test their generators. It’s why sysadmins test their backups. So here’s my challenge to you, dear reader: think about systems you rely on and test them — before you need them.
My high school was built in 1978. In 2009, when I was a student there, there was a small fire in a science lab, and the fire-sprinklers went off. Our principal’s reaction to the ordeal: “Well, I’ve always wondered if the fire sprinkler system worked properly, and there’s no real way to test that bad boy. Now we know that everything works!”
At least they found out before their home was broken into!