The reason they are in Full panic mode... is that even though they *KNOW* what to do and have practiced it a bah-million time, its for real this time.

a Relevant but not close to scale case is this:

The first time I had a REAL server down on my hands and I was 1500 miles away from (rather than 10 minutes driving), I was effectively nearly paralyzed with "How am I going to fix this?"

The Latest one where a bad hard drive was swapped out (no problems there) and a new drive swapped in (lotsa problems there), caused SCSI bus errors all over the place... and then taking 4 hours to find the latent software bug... all in wanting to repair a Failed Drive in a mirrored array...

Was calm and talking the whole way.

Its a matter of being calm, cool, collected and well trained. That makes the big difference.

Panic just doesn't make a situation good... anytime.