The thunder killed it

It all started last Friday. One of the secreta…administrative assistants called and said, “I saw on the news that they are expecting some storms this weekend. Can you, or someone in IT, come in early Monday and bring all the computers back up? Maybe we need to shutdown the servers, too, so that they don’t get damaged.” Uh, thanks for the concern but no. Everything should be OK because all workstations have surge protectors and all servers are on APC battery backups. I told her that if she was worried about it to just shutdown her computer. Plus, I saw the forecast and they were calling for rain. No lightning or high wind at all.

Move forward to this morning. I get another call from the aforementioned admin. assistant. “I told you we would have problems! My computer, monitor and printer won’t turn on! The thunderstorm knocked out everything. Will I get a replacement before lunch?” Again, no. I went to her desk to see what was going on. Queue chugging the last bit of coffee as to not waste the caffeine.

The first thing checked, naturally, was to see if she had tried to turn on the equipment. She was right. Nothing would power on. The next place I looked was the surge protector. I wanted to check it but it was gone. As in not there. As in “why are the power cords all dangling but not connected to the surge protector?”. Her response was beautiful.

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh,” she drug that out,”I disconnected it because of the storm. I don’t trust surge protectors and didn’t want anything to happen. I thought you had came in early and set it back up for me. Guess I should have checked first.”

No, you should have heard me when I said “No” to the request you made on Friday. She reached into one of her desk drawers to retrieve the missing surge protector. Why she felt the need to hide it, as well as assuming I would know it was there, was beyond me. I didn’t ask because I was ready to run. After connecting everything back up, a miracle happened. Everything worked! I was out of there before another word could be spoken.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. – Confucius

22.Oct.07 Hardware, Humor