And then, about an hour after I arrived on Campus yesterday, the power went off with a great BANG! as Eskom / the council decided to switch us off. "Rolling blackouts" - apparently scheduled, but with no warning - had arrived.
Unstressed, I decided to run across for coffee before the hot water cooled - though Marilyn had wisely decanted the coffee into a flask, obviating the need to rush - and a newspaper, given that the Guardian Unlimited, News24 and IOL would no longer be at my fingertips, and no constructive work would be possible for the next while.
I figured that the power would return, sooner or later, and that would allow my repowered PC to connect with the systems which would have been sustained and protected by the barrage of UPS and Generator and redundant cabling, zooty switches, etc that the R78M bought us.
Right. Power returned after a while. The services did not. A polite message dump informed us that the system had "failed".
Eventually, when it became apparent that nothing would happen the rest of the day, I joined the exodus leaving Campus, and found a huge flatbed truck with crane trying to maneouvre into the tiny confines of the Beattie parking lot. With a view to removing the generator, to bail out the ICTS data centre.
By this morning, one could again log in to some of the systems.
By lunchtime, mail started arriving.
It just hasn't been the most productive week:
Two days (and two and a half years of data) lost to Groupwise frying my harddrive.
One day lost to a communication crisis.
One day lost to severed network cabling.
One day lost to power outages and no systems.
Five days. An entire working week. Please can I have a refund?