Up to 20,000 or so other port workers, such as truckers and dispatchers, lost eight days of wages.Both sides claimed satisfaction with the outcome, the unions a bit more vigorously.
Thousands of cash dispensers in America stopped working, and police dispatchers near Seattle had to use pencils and paper when their computers were disabled.
What Mr Allason particularly likes about his internet-based courier system is that it is easily "scaleable": more couriers and markets can be added without having to hire many more dispatchers or people to run a call-centre".There is no longer any need to pick up a telephone to find out where your package is," says Mr Allason.
Belfast's bus company, Translink, tweets rolling updates on which services have been disrupted; taxi drivers get the news from their dispatchers.
Exhausted dispatchers are now looking to the armed forces and to Canada for help.
Unlike the airlines, railroads don't have an oversight agency to co-ordinate their traffic: each of them uses its own dispatchers, who sometimes send faxes to their counterparts to let them know trains are coming.
But train and bus operators, car-rental firms and taxi dispatchers have not.
It is often supplemented with automatic block signals to provide an additional safety factor, and radio is increasingly the means of communication between dispatchers and train crews.
When the CAD system is linked to a global positioning system (GPS), dispatchers can immediately identify the police cruiser nearest the scene of the emergency.
The incident set off an immediate, spontaneous demonstration, and was initially called in to dispatchers at St Louis as a case requiring "crowd control".
The 911 caller told dispatchers that the gun "was probably fake" but dispatchers did not relay the information to the officer and his partner.
