Lady Business: Tech meltdowns and other disruptions; Angela Merkel and Ford elasticity

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 99th issue, published April 19, 2020.
 

Disrupted

 
One of my biggest minor annoyances of working remotely in These Strange Days involves a tedious tech failure.
 
My laptop is in open revolt against Zoom. It absolutely loathes video calls and will take any excuse to shut down in the middle of them, especially if it isn’t plugged in and fully charged. Which I’ve discovered through recurring, dramatic interruptions in the past few weeks.
 
Boom, screen goes dark. Large meeting and/or important conversation, interrupted. Work -- all the open emails to respond to, and tabs to finish reading, and writing I sometimes haven’t saved -- lost. And there’s no time to dwell or fume, other than a few loud expletives, because I need to recover and move on. Boom, shutdown, restart.
 
It’s an extremely minor irritation, almost unmentionable compared to all the bigger things we have to worry about. It’s also extremely bloody irritating, and in-no-way-a-compliment disruptive.
 
And it’s an apt metaphor for how our concentration and routines these days keep on getting interrupted by bad news, internal and external. I spent the past couple of weeks reporting a magazine story that changed sometimes by the hour and certainly by the day, about automakers making ventilators for the coronavirus. Executives and employees are working 20-hour days and pivoting at the speed of light -- all too aware that, through no fault of their own, they may have gotten too late a start:
 

Few of these devices are simple to design, source components for, or manufacture—especially under the pandemic’s life-and-death deadlines. “Lives are at stake,” says Jim Baumbick, the Ford vice president of enterprise product line management, who’s overseeing the automaker’s efforts to make medical supplies for COVID-19. “A lot of these machines are incredibly complex, and adding capacity takes time. And time is the enemy.” 

… Ford expects its internal ventilator production to start the week of April 20, with a goal of making 1,500 ventilators by the end of April; 12,000 by the end of May; and 50,000 within 100 days. (GM will supply 6,000 by the end of May and 30,000 by the end of August.) Still, the effort may not be enough, as experts are predicting the country will need another 14,000 ventilators by mid-April. 

“We’re too late to the party,” says Marcus Schabacker, a physician and the head of ECRI, a nonprofit focused on medical devices and patient safety. No matter how many ventilators are actually produced in the next few months, there are other hurdles that no manufacturer can solve, he says—including an equally dire shortage of trained health care personnel that can use them.

I was closing that story this week when the economic fallout of this pandemic that we’re all furiously covering became more personal for some of my colleagues, along with journalists at so many other publications. Boom. Shutdown. Restart.

The global problem now, and the one that’s causing so many of the personal consequences, is that there’s no analogue for the third step. There’s no clear road map for how to restart without causing a fallout even worse than this current shutdown. Or as Angela Merkel -- one of the relatively few women running a country, and strikingly one of several female world leaders excelling at handling this crisis -- put it this week: “Caution is the order of the day, and not overconfidence.”
 
I’ve had my moments of tech overconfidence the last few weeks. I’ve gotten lost in my reporting or a writing deadline, forgetting to check that my laptop is plugged in. It’s always ended poorly -- meaning inconvenience, not tragedy. When I’ve lost work, I’ve been able to recover within minutes -- rattled and slightly worse off, but still more or less restored.
 
That doesn’t really seem possible on a larger scale. Boom; shutdown. When can we restart?
 

Lady Bits

 
--“Things are very fluid right now.” Disruptions aside, I really enjoyed reporting my Ford story, which includes engineering executive Marcy Fisher MacGyvering the heck out of plastic face shields, elastic, and car weather strips.
 
--"Every morning, a member of the memorial staff goes onto the plaza with a list of birthday names and a bucket of white roses.” Despite the pandemic, a World Trade Center memorial tradition continues.
 
--"A lot of Germans might just say, ‘OK, America is far away and has strange political traditions.’ Of course, the reality is much more complicated.” T Magazine on the foreign correspondents explaining the United States to the rest of the world, including my surf buddy Johanna Bruckner of Süddeutsche Zeitung.
 
--Speaking of nostalgia for some of my recent travels, this article about Finland’s very now-timely tradition of getting drunk at home in one's underwear, or “pantsdrunk,” reminded me how much I enjoyed spending a few days in Helsinki and having a few too many Long Drinks at (pants-wearing) karaoke.
 
--Some wonderful self-portraits (and trivia, like the bananas Broadway stardom of three different Mueller siblings) in this New York magazine photo essay of Broadway stars’ self-portraits. Also, mood:

 
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