One of the things that we realized on our journey was that for some reason, servers always died on Sundays. What I mean by that was that servers didn't die during the middle of the day, when tech support was readily available or able to get access to something. They died at 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. on Sunday night. The night before, we had a record day scheduled on the books–right? And I remember how often I remember, you know, because we had multiple locations, and so I'd wake up and I'd be going to the office and all of a sudden, you know, that sensation when your phone just won't stop vibrating, but you know, it's not ringing and you know, it's messages and like, the world's falling apart? 

And I'd see all these messages, and just the biggest day ever was now gone because the server had blown up, it had melted down with three other things, we couldn't get ahold of the tech support team because the IT guy happened to be on vacation, or even worse, the one server blade that we needed to replace our server blade at this location was no longer available, and they were going to have to order it from from Turkmenistan or somewhere like that, and they were going to have to walk it across the border of the country, then they could ship it. 

I mean, I'm not kidding that those were the types of stories that occurred. And you know, what was you know, what was even crazier is that we had taken precautions to prevent that from being an issue. We were paying for extra service with our IT companies so that they were aware by 4 a.m. that something was going wrong.

We had paid to make sure that there was always going to be backups available, but that just, in my life, things always went wrong on Sunday nights at two in the morning, and all of the safeguards that we had in place never came to fruition. And what we lost was extraordinary. You know, one of the things we learned inside of that, too, is that no matter how good a job we did at rebooking those patients, we always lost money. We always lost revenue. And you know, what that meant is that some of our patients lost care. 

Patients needed that excuse to avoid doing treatment sometime. It was the thing they were waiting for. You know what? I bet you that we had patients out there with little voodoo dolls of our servers and that knew that just by poking pins at them at the right time, they could melt our servers down and get out of actually having to come in.

But the truth was that everybody lost. Not only did we lose a 20 or 30 or $40,000 day in some of our office, because we operated big offices, think about that. So, we're we're operating offices, our average office did 3 to $5 million a year, and so our days were huge. And when we lost a whole day and when we operated extended hours and when we operated Monday to Saturday, there was no time to get that day back. It was just lost and it was gone.

So we had the expense of all the downtime that we'd had and paying our staff who was all there and couldn't do anything. We were just trying to make phone calls. Oh, even worse, if your phones are connected to your server now, you can't make phone calls either. Think about that one for a moment, right?

And so we lost so much time. We still had all of our expenses. Our patients never all made it back in. It was a lose-lose, lose-lose situation without when our servers went down on Sunday night.