The time I had night terrors about us-east-1 outages
Tags: cloud, discuss, aws, writing
Published: 2021-12-28 15:33:28

## Background

I normally never write about personal things, only technical things. However this is one of those times that I feel this is too good not to write down and I need to write this all down now before I forget.

As the title suggests, I just woke up in a cold sweat from an incredibly awkward nightmare thanks to all the AWS us-east-1 outages as of late, here's the story.

## The nightmare

It started as me being back in college going to classes, but for some reason, these college classes were at my high school. Because dreams always make sense. I was in the middle of class and I fall out of my desk very suddenly and I remember feeling very disoriented. I can't get up. People are staring. Finally some kind soul helps me out of the classroom and it just hits me. I'm behaving so strangely because obviously I'm in a simulation. It was obvious to me in the dream that it couldn't be real because well 1. I was in college at my high school and 2. I never just collapse on my own. I think this is what is called [lucid dreaming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream).

Next I'm sitting outside of the classroom in the hallway, still disoriented, but then it goes next level. I start losing my shit. I start taking off my clothes and a neighboring classroom has a teacher giving some standardized test. So naturally she notices me wigging out and brings me a copy of the standardized test to do (because dreams make sense). I'll be damned if I do another one of those tests, so I yeet on out of there half-naked.

As I'm wandering through the halls of school half-dressed, the worst thing that could possibly happen... it happens. **The bell rings**. All of my peers then walk past me looking at me like I'm a freak show. Then it clicks. The simulation that I'm in is running in us-east-1. I had to tell someone. So what do I do? Grab a bystander of course and yell in their face "EBS is experiencing degraded performance!" I mean it made sense right? Why else would I be looking, feeling, and acting this way.

It keeps going. I'm still wandering the halls trying to find my next class. I can't. I can't for the life of me find where this stupid classroom is. I knew my theory was correct because I went to this school for 4 years. I knew where everything was. I would only make sense that my memory is shit because EBS (cloud storage) isn't working.

I make it to my next class eventually and sit down. And wouldn't you know it, my old college professor Dr. Russell is there teaching... in my high school.. where I was taking college classes. Yeah. Anyway, I realize I'm still way too disoriented to sit through this class, so back to the halls I go... still half-dressed.

Then I see my girlfriend (now wife). I thought if anybody could help me or set me straight, it's her. So I run up to her and couldn't even call her by her name. I call her "mom" thanks to the degraded cloud storage powering my horrid simulation brain. She then responds to me and calls me "Mr..." something. 

It was at this point that I knew everything was absolutely as bad as it could be. My own girlfriend didn't know who I was. I didn't even remember her name. I'm in the hallway half-naked. It was then that my virtual world started crashing down around me. I remember falling backwards into the abyss much like Alice in Wonderland. All thanks to us-east-1 being down and not being able to power my simulation.

![alt text](https://media.giphy.com/media/swtiK9jRfE0zS/giphy.gif)

Thanks AWS.

If it's any consolation, I did just go see The Matrix Resurrections