Boredworkers.com

A month ago, we were rushing for a tight deadline when the servers decided to overheat on us. Today, we’re one week away from completing integration tests and the electricity goes out on us. Seems like Murphy’s Law has our number.

I figured it was going to be a long day in the office the moment my alarm went off at 7.30am. My stomach was cramping up from something I ate yesterday. I must have spent at least an hour on the throne before things finally cooled down.

The air conditioner in my office building at Uptown 5 was out due to some power outage. The official word went something as follows:

TO ALL OCCUPANTS
UPTOWN BUILDINGS (1, 2 & 5)

RE: TNB POWER INTERUPTION

Please be advised that all our Uptown Buildings are affected by power interruption today.

We have been working closely with Tenaga Nasional Berhad (”TNB”) on this and their feedback is that supply was cut due to cable fault. TNB has now arranged temporary supply to the Uptown Buildings whilst they undertake repair works.

Power supply to the Uptown Buildings is expected only tomorrow and we have been advised by TNB to reduce our load of power supply in the Uptown Buildings. As such, we are unable to provide full air-conditioning supply to the Buildings.

Any inconvenience caused is much regretted.

Thank you,
The Management.

Now that’s all fine and good. No air conditioning I can live with. The cloudy skies helped a little by blocking out direct sunlight.It did get a little stuffy after a while making it difficult to really concentrate on the task at hand. However, it wasn’t bad enough to call it a day. I’ve had worse days. Without air conditioning, the worse that could happen was the servers exploding. Something which I was incidentally was waiting for to happen.

Instead the electricity went out. At first I thought little of it. That was until I realised I was in the middle of a database restore that had already taken up more than 2 hours and was probably very near completion. There goes my day out the window. The blackout lasted roughly 30 minutes and by the time power was restored, I had lost my mood for work.

To make matters worse, I received another email warning that we’re still running on temporary power and it may trip again. Talk about dampening your mood. Surprisingly enough, the air conditioning is on. That means that the load on the temporary supply is worse than it was before the initial trip. That means the chances of another blackout is even higher now. That means I should be calling it a day.

And that’s exactly what I’m going to do. There are some days which are best spent in bed. Today is one such day. Hopefully they don’t do the rinse and repeat cycle tomorrow. Good day.