And so, the timeline, as well as I can remember it. Bear with me, it’s been a long few days:
4:30am Saturday — The UPS hiccups, throwing the entire Phase 1 part of the office building into disarray. This includes all of the engineering equipment that drives the radio stations, all of the Enco computers that provide audio material to the radio stations, and all of the fileservers, webservers and other servers under my purview. Including this one.
6:00am Saturday — My phone, which has no volume setting for text messages, beeps at me quietly for the 90-somethingth time, having received a litany of alerts from one particular server (which among other duties serves as my watchdog monitor) that does reliably automatically recover from power failures. (As a general rule I don’t like “AC Power Loss Restart”. When the UPS does burp, it tends to go up and down repeatedly for a minute or so. We’ve lost server power supplies from being rapidly cycled that way.)
7:30am Saturday — I arrive at the station and rush about setting things to rights.
10:30am Saturday — I get home, try to unwind and maybe even get some more sleep than just the three hours I’d claimed so far. But no… the three hours was just enough so that my body didn’t really feel like sleeping during a bright noisy day. Argh.
1:30pm Saturday — The UPS… well, you get the idea. Back to work I go. This time we decide to switch over to straight PGE electricity, bypassing the, er, device. Just in case, you know. Since two failures within a day isn’t the sort of thing that inspires confidence in a piece of equipment.
5:00pm Saturday — Out to dinner. Yay, Chang’s.
10:00pm Saturday — Back at work, this time being the only work visit that was actually planned in advance. See, the workmen were scheduled to fix the U-something-something that night. Previous posting’s events take place. (Argh.)
12:30am Sunday — Service techs report that they need additional parts to heal our ailing heap of batteries, and could they come back Tuesday night? “Sure,” we say, because the longer we stay on PGE power the greater the chance that Something Bad will happen.
1:30am Sunday — Sleep, blessed sleep, before a very nice day spent not doing work stuff.
1:30am Monday — The aforementioned Something Bad happens. PGE dropped the ball, and the building was without power for a bit. Oddly enough, the UPS for the other side of the building did its job perfectly. Go figure.
3:00am Monday — My phone’s beeping? Again? Inconceivable!
4:00am Monday — Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work I go…
And here it is, 9am. I’m not sure when I’m going to get home. I’m probably going to have to work tomorrow. And tomorrow night until close to morning, when the service techs claim they can finally fully fix our fragging fritzed facility. And Wednesday daytime, because the boss is on vacation and there’s no way both he and I can be gone the same day.
But hey… I had a very nice day yesterday. That’s gotta count for something.
Are we having fun, yet?
Comments
3 responses to “The Electric Bugaboo”
your story telling skills are great. Love the definitions. *laughter*
I’ve had a couple UPS failures here as well..
Thankfully it’s not the full scale disaster you seem to be fighting. Sorry to hear that bro…
But seriously…WTF?!!
Isn’t there a warranty you can fall back on, and get a new UPS or something?! You have so much more patience than I do. I would have killed something by now.