Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Power to the people...who pay their power bills


I have a very cool little device in my office called a sensor phone. It is cool because it can call me if someone walks into my office, it detects water in the server room, the air conditioner has gone out or the is a power loss. The device is cool because it can do these things, but I have started to loath the device as it has been keeping me from getting a good night sleep on Sunday nights. 3 of the past 6 Sunday nights, I have received a call from this device in the middle of the night about a problem. This week of was due to a power outage.


Sunday night we had a pretty strong wind storm. Because our company gets its power feed from hanging power lines, it was affected by the wind storm and we lost power at 11pm Sunday night. Apparently we were not the only ones affected as the power company did not get out to see us until 1130am, conveniently the same time we had our generator finally hooked up and going. At noon, we finally had the power restored. That was when my life got busy.

Since I am in charge of all the servers for the company, I then spent the remainder of the day bringing the servers back up and testing to ensure that everything worked. We had also performed some upgrades to our delivery system over the weekend so not only was I trying to fix the problems caused by the power outage, but also the bugs that are showing up from the upgrade. This kept life pretty busy for me. Although there are advantages to being busy. Time flies and your day does not seem to be long drawn out moment of boredom.

I like my job and am very thankful for the means it gives me to provide for my family. But an example given by my boss correctly describes how life in the IT world works. "IT is like a plane ride. For most of the time, things are running extremely smooth. But at the end there is usually 2 minutes of hell."

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