Max and I really were in Tuscany, at a friend's villa so peaceful that even Max lowered his guard. And I really did get an email from Amazon Web Services informing me that my cloud usage had a "total impact" of $9,382,457,800. Per day. Not a typo. For scale: my most demanding digital workload is this comic strip.
I went through all five stages of grief before reaching stage six, which is reading the news. It turned out a bug in Amazon's billing estimation system had briefly convinced thousands of customers around the world that they had personally purchased the internet. One user saw an estimate of $1.5 trillion. Amateurs. Nobody was actually charged, and my real bill remains roughly the price of a sandwich.
The part the strip gets exactly right: for about twenty minutes I did not know it was a bug, and Max watched the entire meltdown from the grass without lifting his chin off his paws. He has seen me worry about many things. The location changes. The worrying travels with me. He said it best.
Here's the full story of what happened at Amazon: https://tech.yahoo.com/computing/articles/amazon-corrects-aws-billing-error-173026819.html