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Rats in the Toilet - A Lesson in Crisis Management
On a fine bank holiday Saturday morning, a few months ago, my early morning visit to the bathroom was duly disturbed by my discovering that a rat had set up home in my U-bend. Living on the second floor, this wasn’t something that I had really considered as a possibility, but flushing the toilet brought this into reality as a rat jettisoned itself out of the toilet bowl and into my bathroom. Naturally I fled the scene quicker than …well a rat jumps out of the toilet.
I suddenly realised however that I had a potential crisis on my hands. Having rushed out and waited for the hardware store to open, bought a rat trap, primed it and pushed it into the bathroom through a narrow gap in the door, I sat back and waited. The hours flew by and the sound of a trap snapping shut was not to be heard – my crisis was escalating so other options had to be investigated. My local council do offer a rat collection service as indicated on their website, but being a bank holiday, I wouldn’t even be able to contact them until Tuesday and it was still only Saturday. Sunday came and the rat was still there – it was time for action. I’ll spare the details but there was eventually blood on the floor and a dead rat to be disposed of. Crisis over.
Lessons learnt
This whole incident brought home to me that however well prepared you think you are and however unlikely it is that an event may happen, there is always that small possibility that a crisis may occur, and that the best if not ‘only’ approach is to tackle the problem yourself. This may naturally mean calling on the assistance of others if specialist skills are required, but if it is your problem, it is you who has to take ownership and make sure that it gets resolved – no one else will.Transposing this experience to the workplace, I guess it is best to consider what could happen to your website? The obvious ones being that the site is hacked and defaced or under most extreme circumstances, subjected to a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attack. I remember talking with some friends at an ISP once about a DDOS attack that one of their hosting clients had been subject to. The company in question had actually received an email threatening the attack with associated ‘ransom’ demands a few days earlier, but this had been ignored. The attack subsequently happened and brought not only their server to a grinding halt but also a whole bunch of servers hosted by innocent bystanders – most of which could have been averted if the ISP had been forewarned of the impending attack.
