Power Outage…
I was in a meeting about Sonic Postcards when Gary burst in and asked if we still had power. Turned out one of the three power phases to the college had blown (I’m pretty sure of this, the electrician said it was the case and it certainly smelt like something had melted). Nobody is quite sure how we managed to draw enough power off it to make the something melt, but it did. As it happens, the entire server room and the office happened to be on the phase that blew.
The UPSs kicked in nicely but we had to take out the Windows servers (because apparently they drain the most energy) and leave the Mac servers running. After a while the power outage was seeming more permenant by the second and computers were dropping like flies as the UPSs ran out of juice so we had to take the whole lot down.
…+ Meningitis Outbreak…
Meanwhile, before the power cut the college had received a phone call saying that one of the lads who went on a school trip yesterday has come down with Meningitis C! This means that all the students and staff (including a member of staff I’d just had a meeting with) had to have an injection as a precaution. They all had to be kept after school and walked down to the hospital round the corner (I think).
…= Chaos
Unfortunately the power outage meant that the phone exchange was down so the office staff couldn’t ring all the parents to let them know what was going on. When I relayed this fact to the electrician he said that he could switch one of the working phases to the broken one to give the phones power, and why hadn’t anyone asked him to do this anyway? So the power was switched and the phones back online. The electrician wasn’t sure about the load on the now working phase so we rushed around the place turning everything off that didn’t need to be on.
After a while it emerged that the fuse that had blown was actually one that had to be changed by the electricity board so they had to be called out. At this point the power had to be switched back to how it was so the electricity board didn’t know it had been touched (shh), meaning the phones would go out again. So we ran an extension lead from a working socket upstairs down to the phone exchange, the fax machine and some temporary lighting in the office (it was starting to get dark).
At this point the network manager (who had just popped out) arrived wanting to know why all the lights were switched off!