ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
Country airline Rex has sailed through the recent CrowdStrike outage unscathed, thanks to their system’s reliance on a single Dell Inspiron running Windows Millennium Edition (Me).
While companies across the globe scrambled to respond to the cybersecurity firm’s unexpected downtime, Rex staff were unaware.
“Outage? What outage?” quipped Rex’s Chief Technology Officer, Davis Davis.
Unlike their more high-flying competitors who boast state-of-the-art systems and cutting-edge security measures, Rex has embraced a more grounded approach.
“We’ve only just starting driving Boeings, mate,” said Davis.
“We still run our flight schedules out on USB sticks. We have a clipboard and a print out of flight manifests. We tell our baggage handlers to just remember where each bag goes. The system works.”
The Dell Inspiron in question boasts a whopping 128MB of RAM, a 10GB hard drive, and an Intel Pentium III processor clocking in at an impressive 1 GHz.
“It’s got everything we need and then some,” Davis contuned.
“And with Windows Me. When there’s a bit of downtime, I can sneak in a deathmatch in Age of Empires. It even survived the last CTO smoking next to it for 10 years. If you know computers, you know second-hand smoke kills the quicker than a splash of water!”
Passengers on the Rex milkrun between Birdsville and Brisbane last friday expressed their amusement at the drama unfolding in the terminal.
“Look at these idiots,” laughed long-time flyer Betty Jenkins, enjoying the last of her Peter Stuyvesant on the tarmac before entering Gate 10.
“One little gremlin and the world is on it’s knees. Makes you wonder how we ever chased the Japanese home from New Guinea with that type of nous [coughs] That’s why I fly Rex. No bullshit!”
More to come.
