Blizzard, for those of you who don't know, are the lovely folks who gave us Warcraft, Starcraft, and, of course, that crackalicious addiction of so many here, World of Warcraft.

So you might, from that description, assume the opposite -- that I would wish that I did work for a company that produces so many titles that keep geeks happy.

Except for tonight, when the WoW login servers are gummed up and people can't get into the game.

Or last Monday, when the same thing happened.

Or last Tuesday, when morning weekly maintenance stretched most of the day.

I've been a system administrator -- heck, I still am, through Itasca. And I'm a software engineer. I know, in excruciatingly painful detail, the many things that can go wrong, that can take a server off-line and leave you scrambling to find a way to fix or replace what's busted and get it back into functioning shape as quickly as possible.

And I know all too well how often 'as quickly as possible' stretches into several hours longer than anyone really wants it.

Unfortunately, it doesn't change the fact that there are over a million subscribers paying $15/month to play a game that's been inconsistently available for the last several weeks. Many of those subscribers are quite irate, and quite vocal about it -- the Blizzard support forum thread on tonight's outage alone has accrued 420 messages, most of them whining, ranting, or threatining legal action.

So, yeah, I'm happy not to be on the receiving end of that abuse, right now. Many years ago, when I worked for Cornell, I'd get woken up at 0300 because some grad student couldn't read his pr0n on USENET 'cos the server had coughed up a hairball. That was bad enough. But to have hundreds of people out for my blood because...well, we don't really know why these servers are down, 'cos Blizzard are remarkably opaque about such things, but let's assume, for the moment, something really beyond their control, like a disk went farming.

Yeah. Glad it ain't me. Really, really glad.

Of course, I'd still be very happy if they'd get the servers running again.