Today is the 5'th anniversary of the big Great Lakes-area blackout. 50 million people were out of power for several days before they got the grid completely back up and running.
I was at work when the place went dark. I was in charge of about 60 computer systems. We had about 20 minutes before the UPS would shut down. My boss and I decided to give it a few minutes before starting to power everything off since the application we were supporting was huge PITA to restart. After about 5 minutes or so, we decided that it wasn't going to be a brief outage, so we stared shutting things down. We were about 90% done when the UPS gave out. I told my boss "I guess I'll see you when the power comes back on" and went home. That was a Thursday. Power came back over the weekend, so we restarted everything first thing on Monday.
I was very lucky at the time to work 10 minutes (normally) from home. That day it took me 15 minutes because of the lights being out. Most other people I know were stuck in traffic for much, much longer.
(apologies to MarkC for pilfering his title)
I was at work when the place went dark. I was in charge of about 60 computer systems. We had about 20 minutes before the UPS would shut down. My boss and I decided to give it a few minutes before starting to power everything off since the application we were supporting was huge PITA to restart. After about 5 minutes or so, we decided that it wasn't going to be a brief outage, so we stared shutting things down. We were about 90% done when the UPS gave out. I told my boss "I guess I'll see you when the power comes back on" and went home. That was a Thursday. Power came back over the weekend, so we restarted everything first thing on Monday.
I was very lucky at the time to work 10 minutes (normally) from home. That day it took me 15 minutes because of the lights being out. Most other people I know were stuck in traffic for much, much longer.
(apologies to MarkC for pilfering his title)