another misAdventure

"We are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan."

Thursday, June 28, 2007

The 200

This is blog post #200 for me. Enough about that.

Instead, this is basically a work post.

I left work last night a little earlier than usual last night, and decided to get a couple errands done (exchange my faulty I-Pass transponder, get my weekly comics). I was debating whether to do it then or defer it to today.

It's a good thing I did it yesterday, because my 6-hour monitoring shift today stretched to 11-hours.

The morning and the first part of the afternoon was relatively quiet. Then, about five hours in (i.e., supposedly with an hour to go) we had an indicator that something had failed. That indication also meant we needed to check something else (on 8 different sites) to see if there was another corrective action needed. So, we swung into action ....

... and then the fire alarm went off. I wasn't too concerned. Our building is steel, glass, and concrete; not exactly flamable. And it's long rather than tall, so little chance of problems spreading upward quickly and cutting off exit (as it a tower), nor is a lot of hazardous material stored anywhere. Any fire alarm is likely due to a circuit board shorting out in a lab and generating a bit of smoke.

Nevertheless, our manager decided we better clear out, better safe than sorry, even if we missed a window to fix something and avoid an outage.

I realized a bit too late that I left my cell phone on the table. Which meant, I couldn't call my colleague in a different building (well, a different state) to check on things. Dang.

When we got the "all clear" to reenter the building, I sprinted up to the monitoring room (third floor). At least to the extent that anything I do could be considered "sprinting".

We checked, found some problems, fixed them, but we were a bit late with one preventative measure, and we wound up with a longer outage that recovered veeerrrry slooowwwwwly. That took me about an extra three hours past the time I was supposed to go off shift.

And, just as that finished and we hung up on the outage conference call, we got another signal that something was wrong elsewhere. Eeek! That one we did catch in time to avoid the worst problems, and the system recovered about as quickly as it could be expected to. But that added another hour. And then I needed to respond to a couple things that I couldn't do earlier in the day (or got pulled away from), so I got out of work at 8pm.

I called home -- no one had had dinner yet, so we decided to grab something quick at Steak and Shake. Our waitress probably wasn't the worst waitress in the world, but she trained under her. Inattentive, slow, and with next to no short term memory (couldn't remember who ordered anything). And, Kathy (vegetarian) ordered a grilled cheese with tomato, and instead got a grilled cheese with bacon and tomato. So, the waitress took it back the kitchen and .... as I expected would happen .... removed the bacon and brought the sandwich back out.

And I still can't really justify leaving nothing for a tip, but she did get a poor tip, and probably a few words from the manager (?), who I talked to at the checkout.

And, all in all, it really wasn't that terrible a day. Just nutty.

Tomorrow, I monitor in the evening, then not this weekend. Matt will be home for the weekend because we were supposed to play D&D, but that fell through. Saturday we will probably hit Naperville Rib Fest, which I always intend to go to and haven't in several years. Sunday: Cubs game for Ellen and I, and the kids will probably go to Taste of Chicago.

So, I'll probably update again Sunday if not Saturday.

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