I keep coming back to the same picture: a fence line that had gone soft for a while, more propped up than fixed, until the herd finally leaned into it and it gave all at once, scattering half of them off into the dark before anybody noticed.
That’s about the closest I can get to how it felt when we lost a batch of data at the office. We got every bit of it back. What’s left is the cleanup, the systems that should have been built out before any of this happened, and that’s where I’m still working some nights, alone, after everybody else has gone home to their own beds. It isn’t stragglers I’m chasing anymore so much as fence posts, the ones that never got replaced when they needed to be, so the next storm doesn’t take the line down again.
It didn’t take long for people to hear what had happened. A fair number of them rode up long enough to tell me what I should have done to keep the fence in better shape, and then rode on.
I already knew. I could have told you the right answer before any of this ever happened, same as everybody telling me after the fact. Knowing it and doing something about it in time turned out to be two different things. I made choices along the way, trade-offs to stretch what time and resources I had a little further, and I know now some of those choices are why the fence collapsed when it did.
What helped, through all of it, were the ones who didn’t ride off again after they’d said their piece. They stayed a while. They let me tell the parts I was willing to tell and let it be hard, without trying to fix me or correct me on top of it.
Looking back, the ones who stayed were people who’ve spent a night like that themselves. Mostly folks who work in IT for a living, or folks who’ve ended up doing IT for their organization by default, because the organization either can’t or won’t pay for somebody who does it professionally. They know what it’s like to be out mending a fence by flashlight, because they’ve done it before.
If there’s a point in all this, I think it’s this: show some grace to the person who already knows what they should have done. Chances are they were stretched thin, making trade-offs they knew weren’t ideal just to keep things running, and they knew all of that long before anybody had to say it out loud.
There’s a particular kind of shame tangled up in it too. By supper time, most of the town has heard the fence came down, and plenty of them will bring it up like it’s just an interesting thing that happened, maybe even a funny one. What they don’t always see is that the one who let it get that bad is still out there after dark, setting new posts and counting what’s been found and what’s still missing, long after everybody else has gone home and gone to bed.
I’m grateful for the ones who stayed instead of riding off, and for the ones who let me be stressed about something I already felt bad enough about, instead of making sure I felt worse. And if you’re ever the one standing out there in the dark counting cows, I want to be the friend who comes and stands out there with you.