Prairie and I were in the midst of getting ready for dinner and a movie on Friday evening (which consists of Prairie cooking while I make appreciative “yum!” noises as I sniff the air) when suddenly all the power in my apartment went out. Power outage? The building across the street still had power…and so did the hallway in my building, as did my neighbor (who, as always, is quite happy to provide his own soundtrack to my life).
Crud. My apartment had no power. I checked the breaker box in my apartment, but all four breakers looked fine…and besides, with four breakers, any one of them popping would take out part of the apartment, not the whole thing. This wasn’t looking good.
After a bit of panicking, I tracked down the emergency number for the power company and gave them a call. After being reassured that my power hadn’t been turned off — even though I’m a bit behind on that bill, even the power company isn’t grouchy enough to kill someone’s power at 7:30 at night, long after the customer service center has closed for the weekend — we determined that it had to be the master breaker for my apartment.
I wandered out into the hall and started looking for an obvious breaker box. Sure enough, there were some promising-looking boxes at the end of the hallway. Two smaller boxes, one with a single breaker switch, and two larger boxes. Not knowing which was which, I popped open the smaller of the two large boxes.
Bingo — circuit breakers. Old circuit breakers, to be sure, but circuit breakers. I found the breakers for my apartment (all the way at the very top, of course), found the dead one, and swapped it out with a new breaker from the small pile conveniently left at the bottom of the breaker box. This is pretty old technology, which amuses me — the breakers are about the size of the base of a light bulb, and screw into their sockets. But hey, it works. Plus, there’s these three intimidating-looking things at the bottom of the breaker box — I’ve got no clue what they are, but they look pretty cool.
I was curious, though, about what was in that second, larger box, since all the breakers for the units on my floor were in this box. So, I popped it open — and immediately my eyes went wide and I took a small step backwards. I’m not often faced with “Yikes!” moments, but…
…when I opened the box, I was faced with six more of the intimidating-looking somethings like the three in the smaller box. What really took me off guard, though, was the huge, evil-looking switch that dominated the top two thirds of the box. I’ve never seen one of these switches in the real world — it’s something straight out of old horror movies, Igor poised, one hand on the handle, waiting for his master to command him to complete the circuit and bring his monster to life.
What makes me even more curious, though, is that the switch is currently down, in the “off” position. I can’t tell you how tempting it was to grab it, give a mad cackle, and wildly throw it up, completing the circuit, and…well, I don’t know what, which is precisely why I didn’t touch it. For all I know, it could be entirely disconnected from the actual electric system in the building and be entirely non-functional — but, then again, what if it’s not? So — after calling Prairie down the hall to take a look at this beast — I closed the box, leaving the switch untouched.
Back into the apartment we went, reveling in the fact that I had power again. Prairie started to finish the last little touches of dinner, and I took stock of the apartment. Clock’s going to need to be reset, everything else looks good, computers are rebooting…
“Oh, crap.”
Prairie poked her head out from the kitchen. “What’s up?”
I started laughing. “This is so geeky….”
“Oh?”
“Well,” and I pointed at my webserver as it finished booting. “There’s a certain amount of ‘geek pride’ in a server’s ‘uptime’ — how long it’s been since a machine had to be restarted. My webserver’s been running uninterrupted for almost a year — until tonight! I was at ten or eleven months without a reboot until that breaker popped!”
I’m pretty sure that Prairie did her best to be sympathetic, though she had to do so between bouts of giggling at me.
It was almost a year, though!
“
Ah, well. At least it won’t hurt quite as much when I have to shut it down in a few months to move once Prairie and I find an apartment for both of us.
“Brandenburg Concerto for Violin in G Major, No.4, BWV1049, II. Andante” by Rees, Jonathan/Scottish Ensemble from the album Bach: Brandenburg Concertos, Violin Concertos (1998, 3:41).