I think that's fair. I've been in situations where there are kind of "manufactured emergencies" which boil down to a sales conversation on a deadline which ends up getting rescheduled anyway. I have very little tolerance for that.

In the case of Fog Creek during Sandy, because the software we hosted provided planning and project management for a lot of people, going offline would have a pretty large ripple effect. Sure maybe 95% would've been fine, but I knew of customers who e.g. managed emergency services and crisis response, and so keeping them online was meaningful to me.

"Our company's product will be offline for a few days and we'll theoretically lose money"

This was a startup. The company getting fucked could mean our jobs going away. It was our equity too.

Not everybody is just punching a clock, while resenting the owners of the company. In our case, we wanted our company to do well because we liked working together.

> carrying fuel up 17 flights to keep a children's hospital powered on, or a MUD that's been running continuously since '93? Sure, inspiring as hell.

If MUD is the type of game you're falling into the same trap as the one you're signaling but worse. You're putting in the same sentence "saving kids' lives" and "the bragging rights for a game's uninterrupted session" on equal footing.

Before Jane Street I did more humble work helping gay men hook up as fast as possible via a proto-Grindr site. We were co-located downtown when 9/11 happened. They had diesel generators but they ran out of fuel after several days because the national guard wouldn't let the diesel supply trucks through.

When we went offline customers were super understanding!

Except one customer who was outraged and we felt totally comfortable banning their account.