A goldfish, a power outage, and a very long Tuesday

The storm rolled in on a Tuesday afternoon. By dinner, half the neighbourhood was dark. By midnight, the aquarium filter had been off long enough that we were checking the tank every twenty minutes with a flashlight, watching the water for signs of trouble.

Goldfish are tougher than most people think, but they aren't tough about oxygen. We dug out the battery-powered air pump we'd bought after the last outage and forgotten in a drawer. It worked. The lights came back at noon on Wednesday.

Somewhere around 4 a.m. it occurred to one of us that we had no way to look up the medication schedule for the dog, or the vaccination dates for the cat, because the cloud is — by definition — somewhere else when the power is out. That conversation, in a kitchen lit by a phone, became the requirement that drove offline medical records in the app.

It turns out the right time to find out your tools work offline is not the night you need them to. We built the offline cache so it primes itself on every login and refreshes on every visit. You should never have to think about it; it should just be there when the lights aren't.