When I came back from reading to first graders, I remembered that most everyone in the department was at a lunch to say goodbye to one of the help desk guys who is moving on to another job. So it was pretty empty. There was one guy handling the helpdesk calls.

After being back for perhaps 5 minutes, something started beeping very insistently, and the network connection dropped. Seems that a breaker flipped somewhere, and *everything* in the server room went off.

So for a considerable amount of time, we ran around trying to figure out what to do, and trying to get hold of the folks that actually knew something, while the phones rapidly started ringing, with irate persons wondering why Teh IntarWeb was borken.

Then, of course, when folks with clues came back, we were able to quickly fix was was wrong, but some the servers were slightly angry at having the carpet yanked from under them, and so decided to be grumpy for a little while.

Hilarity ensued, and a good time was had by all.

It’s delightful to be in an IS department large enough that when something breaks, it’s not by default my problem. Sure, I helped out as I could, but there were clueful people who were able to come in and fix what was broken. It was very refreshing.

Not that I wasn’t working with competent people in my previous job, but there were so few of us, and everyone was a “jack of all trades”, so when something broke, we all had to be part of fixing it.