A Warm Place

Monday, 09 April 2007

• Lightning Bolts Suck, Part Three

  Read Lightning Bolts Suck, Part One and Part Two!

  As soon as I walk through the door in our temporary set up, I'm grabbed by one of the Health Services ladies. They need to get to their systems, so I go to work.

  The rest of the day is spent bouncing around the room, helping people try to go about business as usual (or as much as possible). Things quiet down in the afternoon, though, so I walk back to my office in the Municipal Center around 3:30 PM.

  There's my coffee, sitting on my desk. It's been there for six and a half hours. Inside, I cry a little.

  Our office is pretty quiet. There are electric lanterns plugged into the stuff being powered by the backup generator running in the parking lot, but these only illuminate the small server room. Since the server room has glass walls, this effectively makes it look like a giant computer-and-people aquarium. I inquire how things are going.

  Something is definitely wrong with the file server, so Dave is going to head back to the Sheriff's with me and use the computers there to contact some vendors. We drive back, because Dave's not really the pedestrian type.

  We get to the essential services room we have set up, and walk in - straight into a meeting of all of the department heads and supervisors. Apparently while I was gone the place had been partially transformed back into a meeting room, and a meeting had been organized with all the most important people in Warren County. Both of us freeze when we realize what we just walked in on. Most people turn to see who came in, and our District Attorney yells "Yay, the IT guys!" when she sees that it's us. We're on very good terms with her and her office, so I think she's genuinely happy to see us. Either way, the chairman of the board keeps going, and we use the opportunity to sneak off to the back of the room.

  After the meeting, I go back to the municipal center. It's after five, which means even essential services wouldn't be operating at the municipal center, so they don't need me there anymore. Dave finishes his stuff with the vendors, and joins me there.

  When we get back, we wait around for a little while until someone from Buildings and Grounds stops by. They're getting ready to start turning on the electricity one department at a time. The help desk has to walk through each department in the county, and manually power on every PC in the building to check for damage - all 300 PCs. It takes almost an hour, but when we finish it seems like everything is fine. We didn't lose a single workstation, and it looks like the only thing that did suffer damage was the file server. Go figure. Exhausted, everybody goes their separate ways for the night.

  The next day, everything is back to normal. A cleaning crew was called in, so the building doesn't smell like roasted battery acid anymore. It's business as usual; my boss has even decided that we should get compensation time for the time we put in during the two-day outage, because most county employees got the day off. Not only is everything back to normal, but I have 17 hours of free time in the bank. Woo!

  Usually this would be where I get into my philosophical observation for the day, about how this enriched me as a person... but I got nothing. This wasn't really a very philosophical event, although it was great experience. This kind of situation just can't be expressed in a classroom setting, so I'm glad to have it under my belt.

  However, I'm also quite glad it's over with!

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