Yesterday, I was just packing up my laptop at work, getting ready to go home, when the power went out. A coworker and I just kind of sat there for a few seconds, confused as to what had happened, then we slowly turned to look at each other. Dr. Jaromczyk came from next door to see what was up; his wife called from a building across campus, and apparently power was out there, too. We ended up scrambling around trying to turn off our servers before the UPS’s gave out. However, the servers were locked up in a metal cabinet and we didn’t know where the key was. We thought an old admin guy who had since moved on from our lab still had the key, but fortunately Dr. Jaromczyk found a copy. Then we had the problem of being able to log into a server so that we could shut it down. None of us remembered the password, so we were going to ssh to my coworker’s home machine to read his password file, but because of the power outage, we didn’t have Internet access. We were just about to go downstairs with my laptop to see if the wifi was up when the power came back on. Nothing got hurt except for an old machine whose hard drive had been slowly eating itself, and after powering it back up this time, it wouldn’t even boot, it just gave us the Grub menu. Rest in peace, CSURS7.

I read today in the newspaper that a squirrel chewed through some wires and was responsible for the power outage. It affected central and north campus, apparently, so it was a pretty good area. This is the third time this has happened, which just seems hilarious to me. When I left the building yesterday, I passed a server room and people were scrambling around in there, I assume on damage control from the power outage. I can just imagine folks all around campus being interrupted at work, in classes, in their dorms, and trying to minimize data loss… all because of a squirrel. Then today when I was walking to class, one of their group had the nerve to bark at me from a tree. Cocky squirrels.