Disaster Recovery Journal Summer 2026

The Forgotten Small Things By THOMAS MAGEE A few weeks ago, I received an interesting email from an old friend. He had received an emer gency notification email about a threat to his prior place of did look generic, like a system produced it. There was only one small problem with the email. He had retired from that place of work two years prior. Their emergency notification system had not been updated to show his retirement. I thought if that occurred for sure new hires in the same period were probably not in the database. The email did not surprise me. It mirrored what I have seen myself in work. They were going to close the local federal building due to an unspecified threat. He was not supposed to show up to work that day. This was during a time when federal buildings across the country were the scene of real violence between police forces and protestors. Buildings in San Diego, Los Angeles, Portland, and Minneapolis all had been the scene of violence prior to the message. He was not to report to work the next day. The email organizations. Few people want to update databases for emergencies or anything else. The work is tedious, painful, and usually forgotten until people must pay attention to it. It also reflects the low priority disasters or emergencies rank

when there is no emergency knocking at the front door. I could image the scramble when real emergencies occur. Data screw ups for sure would rise to notice then. Management walks the cube farm quot ing Shakespeare, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” (The famous line from William Shakespeare’s historical play “Richard III,” Act 5, Scene 4. King Richard III roams the battlefield shouting those words to try to get a horse to escape on.) They desperately seek the magic key to fix a problem and move on to the next thing. The blind eye on updating databases reflects a larger problem. Organizations produce plans, but after it gets published, the plan moves to its secondary purpose, as a doorstop for the front door. A study by PR News Service found 62% of busi nesses have crisis plans but few update them. Data shows only 49% of the plans

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