Damn PG&E. Actually, it's my own fault as I forgot they had sent me a mail telling me that there would be an outage in my neighborhood in the early hours of this morning. I woke up with my computer UPSes screaming for attention. That's easy to say now but at 1:30am, after being woken from deep sleep, I had no idea what that electronic high pitched beeping was. Was it my wife's new Palm alerting her to some mistyped appointment? Was it a smoke detector gone mad? I tied to switch on my bedside light to identify the annoying electronic sound. 'That's weird', I thought,'what a coincidence that my light should be broken too.'
I'm so gullible, it wasn't until I noticed that red glow of my alarm clock was also out that I had some inkling of what was going on. Crawling around under furniture and computer equipment I found the unfamiliar switch to interrupt the uninterruptible power supplies. I even got my wife's machine to power down cleanly but (note to self) I need to get a beefier UPS for the office. Surprisingly with two AMD XP PC's with four hard drives a piece and two monitors attached to one UPS obtained on cheapy-special from Fry's the UPS battery only lasts a minute or two. Who knew?
I wandered around the house this morning half heartedly resetting flashing clocks and finding stations on radios with empty presets (note to self - remember to buy batteries on way home). I know there's another scheduled outage tonight so I'll have to do it all again tomorrow but this time I'll remember to shut down my PCs. Hopefully a second interruption will miraculously repair what ever is wrong with my network on the ground floor of my home as my geeky slim device and Audrey are both complaining that they can't find the network this morning. More likely, that old network hub I hid under the couch has been switched on and off one too many times.
As I fell back asleep last night I realized how many wired and wireless devices I now rely upon in my home. A nightmare followed with my dishwasher berating me, "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that!" |
