Reliable Systems

I am coming to appreciate how unreliable systems can lead to more reliable systems.  At the school I taught at in America, if the power went out, school was cancelled.  Here on the campus where I am currently attending training, things are not that way.  Since the power goes out frequently, they have a backup generator to keep school in session during outages.  So in some ways, power is more reliable here.

I found out the other day, though, that not everything runs on the generator - like the water pump that fills the tank for the building I am staying in.  It can be a real problem when you have 70 people staying in a building and there is no water to flush the toilets - at least it is a real problem in America.  Here in Africa when that happens, buckets of water to flush the toilets magically appear in all of the bathrooms.  It turns out that they have a backup system for that too.