The Power of Electricity

The power went out at my office this evening.  That used to be a common occurrence, but hadn't happened since the day we move into our new building over a year ago.  Our battery backups kept things up long enough for everyone to save their work and shut down, so the only thing we really lost was time, but it was interesting to see different people's reactions.  People who are only used to the city have no idea what to do without power.  It seems like they think power grows on trees (specifically those tall skinny ones with perpendicular branches, and really long, thin, connected foliage, right?).

In most industries, that situation would be considered a perfect excuse to head home, since it was already late in the evening, but people in Hollywood are just different.  Their projects are already on tight schedules, and working constantly is just part of the culture.  Most people tried to wait it out, and stuck around for an hour or so, but after a few drinks and no sign of repairs being made, they took off.

DWP estimating 10-12 hours when we finally got through to them on the phone to report the problem, since 50,000 customers were supposedly down due to high winds damaging transmission lines.  Anyone planning to do a late shift was out of luck, and it was interesting to observe everyone counting the cost of what possibly missing the next day worth of work would mean for their project schedules.

I had just finished disconnecting everything and was locking the door when the lights came back on two hours later.  That necessitated another hour of work to get all of the servers back online, as well as the phone system and storage network, all of which have to be booted up in the right order for things to work smoothly.  It is amazing to think about how much complexity there is in an average office, none of which would have been an issue even twenty years ago.  What will it be like in another twenty years from now?

It was probably good timing in a way, since I was in town to make sure everything came back online properly.  And since we are in the process of designing the power system for our next building, having this happen now will help people realize the value of having backup solutions for greater security.  But regardless of how much we invest in redundant systems, there is still only so much power that we have to control our situation and circumstances.  We aren't God after all, although sometimes we'd like to think we are.