I knew how some of my colleagues would react, having gone through similar experiences with them before, but some others were unknown quantities. Amongst those, one particular colleague who I'd suspected of being a little ineffectual suddenly came to the fore and demonstrated a calm, composed professionalism under intense pressure that would still have been impressive in someone with twice their experience - it's nice to be proven wrong sometimes.

Well, I'd suggest many of the clues are already there if only we look for them; indeed they're often blatantly obvious with 20:20 hindsight. What we need is to develop the knack of spotting them in advance. There's no magic formula for achieving this, but taking the effort to mentally appraise each of your colleagues within the "disaster recovery" context is still an exercise well worth carrying out.

I find these two paragraphs to almost cancel each other out... but I know what you are saying. The thing is that people will genuinely surprise you when it comes to the crunch, and really you need to be sure that you don't surprise yourself (at least not negatively). You have no control over anyone else's actions, but you can do your best to make sure you are cool, calm and collected. As an 18 year old I was involved in a medical emergency. I knew how to handle it and what to do, but allowed myself to be swayed by the panicking people around me and I ended up being completely ineffectual. This was a shock to me, but the next time a similar situation came up (in my late 20's) I knew that I needed to focus on what I knew and not on what the panickers were trying to do.

I don't know how I'd be in an IT emergency, but I'm pretty sure it would be a lot less freaky than either of those occasions.