Dependency

Wow, this weekend, I learned that I have come to depend on the Internet and electricty alot more than I think is comfortable.  What could cause me to come to this conclusion?  Well, let us start from the beginning.  Monday, I worked 12 hours, which while great for my paycheck, is bad for me in general, mainly because I am lazy and like working only 8 hours a day.  Forward to Triday.  Great day, Not the end of the month, so things aren’t hectic (I deliver copiers, and sales people tend to put in all their sales for delivery at the end of the month, so the first few days/2 weeks of the month are mainly pickups and some sales) and because of the holiday, as soon as we finished our deliveries for the day, we could go home - WOOHOO!  Got done around noon, instead of 3 as usual time.  Was lazy for the rest of the day.  Friday comes, and it storms a tiny bit, there were approximately 15 minutes of 60mph winds.  Power went out.  3 hours later, the apartments across the parking lot from us had their power restored.  I couldn’t wait!  It was only a matter of time before mine would be up!  Well, it came up about an hour later, or at least, it tried to.  There was some electricity, but not enough to run anything.  The lights kept getting dimmer and dimmer, until I lit a candle and could see again.  Well, no, I didn’t light a candle, I didn’t have any.  But if I had, it would have been brighter than the lights were.  So, a call out to the electric company was in order.  What is this?  An automated system that sends the report to their technicians.  Awesome!  Automation at its finest, I just call and report it, and they send a technician out right away!  Ummm, no again.  Power was off from noon:30 ish on Friday, and then Saturday rolled around.  I woke up excited, my room was so bright!  Darn, it was the sun shining in my window.  A very hot day, one that would have been perfect with some air conditioning.  Unfortunately, we still didn’t have power, so it was not quite perfect.  A friend of mine from work showed up, and gave me some relief, because his computer and network was down at his house, and needed it fixed.  I jumped on the chance to fix his computers (he also has air conditioning!) Fixed them just great.  Then I installed the drivers for the motherboard.  Then WindowsXP refused to boot.  Safe Mode attempt showed that it was having a problem getting past the AGP driver.  Odd, there wasn’t an AGP video card in his machine.  Oh well, I would think on it, and return home, praying for electricity the entire way.  It did not happen.  Then I had an Idea!  I have a laptop, and I have a battery backup.  So, the little juice that was coming out of the wall was powering my laptop’s ac adapter, and the battery backup was powering the cable modem.  YES!  I was online!  I could just tell that things were going to get good.  Then I realized, I still needed to get Dee’s computers running.  Off to my pile of miscellaneous hardware.  No good video cards.  Hmmm, then it hit me, my webserver has a GeForce2  video card in it, and being a webserver, it didn’t need a video card.  And it was AGP!  So, I gave the AGP card to Dee, because I know he can put a computer together, so popping in the video card shouldn’t be a problem.  Off he went, and I was singing a happy song to myself as I was able to get on the internet on my (linux) laptop.  Well, there were no updates at the electric company, so I called them a few more times, hopeing that perhaps my first few calls hadn’t gotten through somehow (hey, if power was out here, why wouldn’t it be there right?)  Oh yeah, the people across the parking lot had power.  Turns out, only our row of 4 apartment buildings had power.  I went to bed a very sad person without electricity.  I woke up the next morning.  The sky was overcast, it was going to rain again, and my roommate had heard on the radio that they thought the power was going to be knocked out again.  "Wouldn’t it being knocked out again, require us to have powe restored first?" I asked him.  He just shrugged.  Suddenly, I was excited, the lights started to get brighter, but as if on some cue, knowing my excitement was rising, bam.  Off went all power, and with it, the battery backup drained of its power, and laptop could run, however, there was no internet connection, so no need to keep it running.  Then I had a novel idea.  Let’s clean my room!  I mean, it’s been a while (I have pictures that I may post if I can get over the embarrassment of them) since I had cleaned it last, and so I went all out.  Broke out the Endust, and Windex and 409, and was about to break out the vacuum as well, but then, I realized, no power, so I was kind of crestfallen that I couldn’t vacuum.  I cleaned and cleaned.  Then Dee showed up, his computer still wasn’t working.  Neither was my AC, so once again, I hopped at the chance of fixing his computer (and basking in the wondefulness that is Air Conditioning.)  I simply reinstalled Windows (it’s so fun to do that)  and everything was up and running, he was happy, and his wife made me some corn on the cob (YUMMY!!!)  So, I came home, and glorious day it was, I could hear the sweet music of the air conditioner running as I exited Dee’s car and stepped onto the sidewalk leading to my apartment.  Ah, it was nice, although, I still don’t quite understand how or why the power was out for 50+ hours while the apartments across the parking lot had power after 3 hours.  Its crazy how things work sometimes.  Hope everyone else had a great 4th of July though.