Power Cut
They say silence is golden but I disagree. Silence is not so appealing when it is the result of a power cut you accidentally caused.
There are a lot of wires under my desk that power the computers, monitors and various other items of electrical equipment on my desk and those of the people near me. So when my foot accidentally caught the switch on one of the multi plug blocks today and turned it off all three desks (mine included) lost power. Half the room fell silent.
I tried to fix the problem as quickly as I could, apologizing while I crawled under my desk to turn everything back on but that turned out to be a mistake. The abrupt demand of electricity it caused when it all simultaneously came back to life forced the circuit breakers to shut everything down and the whole room suddenly went silent. You never realize how loud a computer fan is until they all suddenly go off at once. Silence is not golden. Silence is filled with the swearing of co-workers.
I had not just cut power to our room either. I managed to take out the power to a few of the servers used by the entire company at the same time. Everything is working again now but you can imagine how I felt.
I am Stuart. Destroyer of servers. Opps.
It’s so funny you talk about silence when PC’s go off. I work in an office with about 50 pc’s and the difference in sound when people go home is unbelievable.
I’m sure they silently appreciated the break, unless they didn;t save their work. Oops!
I used to knock out various wires all the time and cause havoc at home…until I went wireless (yay!) but there is always somethings important that you can’t have without wires.
Hope everything’s back to normal and up & running.
comoox – I find it funny that its hard to notice until it happens.
ChickyBabe – They seem to understand. It’s not the first time we’ve lost power in the building.
Ha ha well done you!
Speaking of powercuts the polish cut our power in the shop AGAIN! Bloomin’ cheap labour! I should know them all on first name basis by now theyve caused us that many problems!!
I have a nasty habit of kicking at electrical cords while I sit at my desk. If my big toe gets electrocuted one more time, it’ll fall off and scurry away to conquer some small country in western Europe.
Charlemagne Stavanger – I can’t wait until the day that no wires at all are needed, even power cables.
Marycub – Its starting to sound like they don’t know what they are doing :p
Temmahkrik – If I see it in Holland I’ll catch it for you
Sounds like a dodgy power setup, shouldn’t there be failsafes and such? In fact, I’d go so far to say this isn’t your fault at all, it’s your company’s, and you should be sueing them for the distress caused to your person.
Let me know how that goes.
Hi Stu, thanks for your comment on my blog! I do agree about Queen. Would find it hard to be without them too. Your big oops sounds like the ‘crawl in a hole and grovel’ type. But, it sounds as if there’s altogether too much loose cable around! You can’t be blamed for that surely..;-)
Hope they were able to fix it and no one’s giving you the hairy eyeball still!
PS. Like your blog very much. It’s so nicely laid out and your cartoons are fantastic
in our old office the electricity would constantly fail as it was such an old building. the amount of times the server flipped was one too many causing Q (who looks after the IT dept.) to go balistic and charged at the landlady who happened to be in the building, like a bull.
she was in the cellar with an electrician who caused the outage – by changing a lightbulb …
Bonestorm – I have to sue them for the collapsing ceiling first :p
vallyP – I don’t think anyone really blamed me. Most of them seemed to find it funny.
Zed – You didn’t used to work in a building in Amsterdam did you? :p It sounds very much like our office.