Zune Thoughts: When Good Plans Go Bad

"I got to work this morning and after catching up on my reading I decided to check out some tunes on Zune Marketplace... Where was my "download" option? I have a Zune Pass and should be able to download/stream 95+% of the music in the Marketplace... I finally went to an internal mail list and saw a thread titled "download option disabled with zune pass." Ah-ha, that looks familiar! Sure enough it directed me to Cesar Menendez's post from yesterday: Zune Marketplace: Down Between 2 and 5 AM PDT (Maintenance Only). But I'm sitting at my desk and it's about 9am PDT. A full four hours past the end of the maintenance timeframe. Oops. So I have a few suggestions for the Zune group..."

And the number one suggestion is? Expect it not to work. If you have an upgrade planned, and it's going to take 3 hours. Expect it to take 6 to 9 hours. As someone who has worked in a technology related field for the past 12 years, I can completely sympathize with this sentiment. Just last night, I myself had an equipment migration planned. I explained to my wife how it wouldn't take more than about an hour. Four hours later, I was finally on my way home, after having rolled back the changes because of some unexpected difficulties. It does seem like these types of projects always take much longer than anticipated.