Hm. The outage over the weekend may have been caused by a massive outage in BT's Manchester centre, which it seems is rather a large single point of failure.

is it bad that I didn't notice?

How about a nice game of "imaginary crescent"?

I was myself substantially surprised to find the machines inaccessible and then, upon 'fixing' it, not find a mention on MCiOS.

[Nik] I think it's known as 'polite outage' - much like a silent fart.

oh, but that we should go for a whole day without a fart joke!

(Chalky) I'm not convinced that silent farts are polite. If one is going to pollute, one should own up to it. Not that I would, mind.

[Rosie] Hmmm - see what you mean. I thought I'd added the words '.. when there's no-one around' [which might make more sense of the analogy]

I've created a game :-)

Politeness requires that one should try not to make a noise when expelling anal gas. It similarly requires that one should not make a noise upon discovering expelled anal gases. Thus society continues in a mutual agreement to ignore the occurence.

sounds like a lot of heads being buried in sand to me...

My father used to say "you're like a fart in a colander" to indicate uselessness. I don't know why that has just popped into my head or even why I'm bothering telling you lot, but there it is.