Power!

Yesterday was progressing at the shop. It was hot and humid outside and most people were intelligently living their lives in air conditioning - either in their cars, homes or businesses. Quite suddenly, around 2:00 p.m., everything came crashing down. The power went out. Checking next door, they were without power too, as were the stoplights at the corner intersection. Oh joy!

Power outage - never fun, but at least this time we weren't in pouring
rain and it was relatively short. The worst are during dangerous weather
conditions, so I'm grateful. 

After contacting the utility company and reporting the outage, I got the news that it will be 3-4 hours before the power is restored. Apparently it is a blown transformer - not really sure exactly what that is, but up to 800 homes and business have been affected. I shut the computers down from their battery powerblock links, turned off the powerblocks (they have a really annoying "beep" to let us know that the power is off and we are on battery) and turned off extraneous lights. I turned off the laptop, many of the secondary light switches, and spent a ridiculous amount of time on hold with my alarm company to let them know I'd be on battery backup for a few hours.

According to the utility company, it was a transformer problem. Of course
I have no idea if it was an equipment problem, or if a car ran into something
somewhere. I'm just grateful it didn't last longer than it did. 

There's nothing like working with color specific items in the dark. I have windows across the front of the store that allows us to continue working, but if someone actually came through the door for product, we would have been totally out of luck. Fortunately/unfortunately, nobody actually came in to shop so we dodged that issue. Also fortunately, the power was restored within two hours instead of the 4-5 they originally quoted. I then reversed the shut-down process, turning on all of the varied electronic devices and powering up our operational software. It was a mess, but it could have been so much worse.

Here's hoping you have a Friday filled with joy and power. Electricity is good! LOL.