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The Veruca Salt of Data – Man Downloads Almost a Terabyte Using Free Data

One of the things I live for that makes my little black soul glimmer for a single moment, are giant fails. It’s especially great when these fails are publicly performed by businesses and companies (because I like to think those […]

One of the things I live for that makes my little black soul glimmer for a single moment, are giant fails. It’s especially great when these fails are publicly performed by businesses and companies (because I like to think those little grey heads driving in Mercedes and Audi’s lose their hair quickly from work related stresses, while they’re using $100 bills to wipe their asses.)

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So you can imagine my delight when I look at the TV to see “Telstra down! Customers outraged” splattered across the news. Apparently the outage was due to human error (this is why we need robots to run the world). The result of this mistake? A large number of people were unable to make calls or use the Internet. OMG, how do we know what you had for lunch if you can’t Instagram it?!

Voice services were prioritised, with those services back about two hours after the problem was spotted (if 2 hours is prioritizing please no one let Telstra run an ambulance service.) Data returned 90 minutes after that, along with 7000 snap chatters with anxiety.

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While Telstra was criticised for blaming a single employee for the mistake, the same incompetent employee remains working for Telstra. I guess we don’t all learn from our mistakes.

But I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet. To say sorry, Telstra couldn’t buy all their whinging customers a pony, so they did the second best thing. They allowed a full day of free data on two separate occasions. On April 3rd, like a fat kid in a lolly shop, 27-year-old self-confessed nerd, John Szasvari, downloaded 5 seasons of MythBusters, 24 seasons of The Simpsons, Xbox updates, Microsoft software, oh and concluded with their entire database of Wikipedia. The Veruca Salt of data didn’t want “an Oompa Loompa, daddy” he wanted 994GB of downloads.

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Conveniently, Szasvari lives near a 4GX mobile tower, allowing him to download faster than 4G. Somehow, this TV series enthusiast has a girlfriend, but she unfortunately was only able to average a download speed of 5Mbps (I wonder who was hogging the downloads.)

Szasvari has now moved onto the task of watching thousands of hours of his collected episodes, because what else is there to do with life, right?

“Then I’m thinking two Simpsons episodes per evening for the next foreseeable while to remind me of when I was a child,” he says

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This has been one small step for man, one giant leap for nerd history.