On Sunday, 3-13-2022, Alex and I swapped vehicles. He is driving the Ford F-150 until we drive to Des Moines on 3-26 to help him move out of his apartment and into a townhouse. I didn't think about adding his Nissan Rogue to my parking permit account so when I was greeted with this parking ticket after work. I added his vehicle to my parking permit account and yes, I definitely appealed the ticket!
Not to dwell upon the parking ticket for an extensive number of words, but I couldn't help but think about how receiving this parking ticket relates to disaster recovery preparedness and completing disaster recovery documentation for a system that provides a service. Bear with me as this is a twisted relationship, but it does exist and the "twistiness" of the relationship doesn't mean it isn't worth exploring. To the parking permit office, seeing Alex's car in a parking lot and that car not having a parking permit triggered an event. In my case, because I wasn't pro-active and didn't think about preparing to swap vehicles until 3-25, a pseudo-disaster happened due to not being prepared. I had to react to the disaster and act in response to it. In a disaster recovery situation where restore instructions for a system do not exist when the disaster happens, the system owner may not be able to resolve their system's outage as easily as how easily I was able to restore the "disaster" of not pro-actively entering Alex's vehicle to my parking permit account.
Of course, no, receiving a parking ticket yesterday is not even close in the degree of awfulness to an actual disaster.
However, as I often do, I perceive a change in how I think compared to how I thought prior to starting at the University of Iowa. For the first 7717 days of my career, I worked at various companies as a technical writer at various software companies. In summary, my primary work function at each of my previous employers was to document software systems. I did the math and this next phase of my career is only 2178 days (5 years, 11 months, 2 weeks, 1 day) old. That's 22.011116725619% of my entire career, but there's a difference in the way I think now in this phase of my career as a technical writer. My primary work is to assemble disaster recovery documentation and while these two phases of my career have differences - I'd be foolish to claim that there is zero overlap between the "document software systems" phase of my career and the "disaster recovery documentation" phase of my career - I will say that receiving a parking ticket made me think about the event in a way I would not have ever thought about prior to 3-28-2016. I acknowledge the difference in the way I see the world around me since I began working on disaster recovery documentation.
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