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Comment by fbailey | Hacker News Reader

cool, but after the title I had the horrible thought that this was about an SaaS Company powering down for a week...

Downing Customer Service for a week is not much fun for anybody, but it's doable. You just need to manage the expectations for your users and make sure your product is so self-explanatory that it really doesn't need much customer service in the first place.

I can do a week's worth of handholding for all the services I run in about 2 hours. Normally I do it during the week as needed, but occasionally I'll troop off into the sticks for up to a week at a time. Thus far I've managed to pull it off without the business collapsing.

Yeah, the headline doesn't parse. The verb is "downs," it seems, but they're not taking anything down.

They haven't taken anything down, they've put down their tools.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/throw_down_one%27s_tools

Except that they haven't. They've just been told to work on other things for 3½ days.

I like the idea though.

That's exactly what confused me, they aren't putting down tools, they're just using them for whatever they want.

I really like the idea too, at my last job there was a lot of discussion for a while about taking 4 hours each week to work on whatever you wanted and present it to the group at the next team meeting. It never really panned out, at least not officially.

It parses if you are a Brit. The phrase 'down tools' harks back to the years of industrial strife when the union would instruct workers to ... well, I'm sure you can guess.

My thought on this initiative was that it reminded me of the Google system of personal projects, expect coordinated across the entire company.

down (v): to drink rapidly; to quaff

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