The time I had night terrors about us-east-1 outages

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.

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.

Thanks AWS.

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