Had a bit of a work emergency last night, so my normal evening time with the family was abbreviated.

The power to my building, and to the building next door, went out at exactly 5pm.  So I sent everyone home and then waited around in my office for it to come back on.  Fortunately I have pretty large office windows, so I didn’t have to sit in the dark to do so.

The view from my office, Hokusai‘d via Prism

90 minutes later, the temperature was steadily making its way up to a thermal equilibrium of 94°, and we still had no juice.  So I packed it up and headed home for dinner.

By doing so I got to spend a couple hours with Jen and Daphne, all while keeping a weather eye on the “outage tracker” on our power company’s website.  At about 9pm the little red exclamation point over our office went away, signaling that power to that location had been restored.   So, once my girls were both on their way to bed, I quietly slipped into the car and drove back to the office to set about bringing things online again.

A long drive when you don’t know what’s waiting when you get there…

Fortunately, this ended up being a relatively error-free process.  There were a couple hiccups here and there, but nothing too drastic.  A printer straggled off the network at some point in the night, but it was (reluctantly) herded back into the pen this morning.

The whole thing was a reminder of a very distinctive part of my job.   I am on-call 24/365 to ensure that our office functions with zero defects.  (Well, with as few defects as possible anyway…)
This is the reason that I get to have mornings with Daphne, some extra half-days off here and there, and keep a comparatively flexible work schedule.  Because I never know when I’m going to have to stop whatever I’m doing and race to my office to solve problems.

It’s okay Daddy; I’ve got this one.

Let me get this booted up and I’ll RDP into the network.

Hmm, I’m getting zero ping responses from the firewall.

I’ll run a tracert to see where the problem is.

There.  All fixed.  Let’s go read “Wheels on the Bus.” 

Nights like last night are when I earn that time.

And I’m completely okay with that trade.

j.s.