Another day, another power blip

There are few things more likely to put you in a bad mood first thing on a Monday morning than the power going off at 8:45am. Not only was this minutes before I was due to start work, it was also just seconds before I was about to make my first cup of the coffee for the day!

As usual, I double checked that everything was working fine on the UPSs, and waited 10 minutes, before safely shutting the servers down a full half hour before the UPS batteries would have run out. I wait ten minutes, just in case it's a minor blip, and I always shutdown early if I can so that there is some juice left in the batteries in case I need to bring the machines back up to get some information.

As to what I do?

I deliberately always have a number of chores about that I can do sans computers. Not because we have power cuts regularly (although this is our fifth in about six months), but because there are simply times when I don't want to be in front of a monitor. I keep filing at an 'always some to do' level, and I never reduce my reading pile to nothing if I can avoid it. There are also always those little jobs, like tidying the cables or moving equipment, which I sometimes deliberately delay until a point when I either don't need, or can't use, the computers. To most time management specialists these kind of things are wrong, but in an increasingly electric-centric world the sanity of having work that doesn't rely on electricity is sometimes soothing.