AT LEAST ROME DID NOT have to put smudge pots on top of City Hall and use them to send out smoke signals but that recent total crash of its computer-based information system — and its duration — has interesting aspects.

One supposes losing all email ability was the most annoying internally and for citizens wishing to make contact but at least there still were the tools from caveman days available: phones, faxes, paper, the mailman, human interaction.

Fortunately, as most mission-critical outfits do, the city had all its most vital (read: money connected) stuff on a separate computer system offsite such as payroll and personnel records. What vanished, when the attack dogs of the digital age ate all the city’s homework before experts could recover it, was that financial reports, legal agreements and so forth commonly known as “public records” were no longer public. Can one assume original paper copies still existed?

In an understatement that holds true even outside of City Hall, Kirk Milam, the public-services director, observed that “We’ve developed a great dependence on technology.” Sure have. “This is not the end of the world,” he added. However, in the old days before all this technology when the equivalent disaster would probably be having city hall or the county courthouse burn to the ground, it would have been. All those valuable public papers would not only be gone but impossible to recover in any form. Perhaps all living today should count their blessings in having computers and not their lost emails.