Last night, I went to bed at 12:30. Admittedly late knowing that I was to take an hour and a half drive the next morning, meaning I’d have to leave at 8 am to get there in any decent amount of time. I fell asleep pretty well right away, which is unusual for lately, then at 2 am one of our smoke detectors (with CO2 detection) went off… for five seconds. And stopped.
I pretty well bolted out of bed (I remember saying “what the hell?” out loud twice and was halfway downstairs before I was really conscious), searching for any sign of anything that could have caused the smoke detector to freak out randomly, given that it wasn’t a short chirp like the usual warning that your battery’s giving way. In fact, as I was still in a half asleep fog, I wasn’t even sure which of our three detectors had gone off. Also, neither of the other two had registered a even a blip. So, I closed all the windows in case someone was burning something outside (which happens often around here in the summertime), then went back to bed. I was concerned it would happen again, and the adrenaline of the situation was still pumping, so I didn’t fall asleep easily.
And at 3 am, it did happen again, only it kept ringing. I tore it down off the ceiling and pulled it out of the power outlet it was connected to, but it kept ringing. It took me about a minute and a half of turning it over, twisting it and prodding it before I found the battery outlet, on the front of the stupid thing. Having taken it down, I was able to get back to sleep relatively easily this time. Too bad 7:15 came along really quickly.
Got to work, thinking I was doing the job solo, but the IT guy for the site was there, bum knee and all. Sadly, I had to do much of the brainwork, being that that’s why I was called in — the other IT guy couldn’t figure out what it was exactly that was necessary to get all the phones moved, despite being walked through it by folks higher up on the food chain than myself. So he was stuck doing gruntwork, hobbling back and forth using a chair to transport computers back and forth, while I hunted down the correct punchdowns to pull, reroute and re-punch on the proper spots. The whole job had much fewer complications than I had anticipated, given that I was told there was a number of wires that needed special punchdown configurations (which by the way nobody gave to me, so I would have had to guess and test through the process).
The biggest complication, however, came from something totally out of my control. Some idiot apparently wrote something along the lines of, “there’s a bomb in the building”, on the womens’ washroom mirror, using mascara. This delayed our move project significantly — almost two hours lost right after lunch, right after I had gotten everything straight and gotten a plan put together, and right before I actually got to implement it. So there I was, stuck sitting in the parking lot (sitting, literally, because of the amount of standing and walking I’d had to do for quite some time up until that point), needing to go to the bathroom, with absolutely nothing to do but watch the comings and goings of the cops and fire truck and forensic unit, desperately wanting coffee (those two facts kind of go hand in hand — I’d drank a good deal of coffee already at that point), not knowing hardly anyone at the centre, when it started to rain.
Impressed by this turn of events, I marched off to a nearby building (where Clifton happens to work) to find a bathroom and some coffee. The coffee was definitely necessary at that point — I was nearly falling asleep on my feet. It was also horrible. Seriously tasted like it was on a burner for eight hours, even though it was in a carafe.
Anyway, to wrap this story up (as I’m dead at this point), we dealt with the remainder of the phones in roughly five hours after regaining access to the building once the forensic unit had left. The drive home was a killer as far as awakeness is concerned, though luckily it only sprinkled a bit so I didn’t also have to deal with the elements.
Now. It’s time for bed. Once again I push off my draft. (Not that it’s the only one. I have two other drafts on the go that I still haven’t posted, because I never really get around to working on them.)
Two hours to look for a bomb? In that building? Was there only two of them doing the searching? Guess they weren’t in much of a rush. And given the level of the average IQ there I’m surprised that anyone could spell the message clearly, especially on a bathroom mirror.
Hope you had a good nights sleep, I can sympathize the whole lack of sleep thing.
Oh yeah, the other reason I neglect to eat there. Everything sucks. Mold is not uncommon.
You guessed it. Only two people. The waiting for people to show up took maybe two or three minutes at most, the actual searching took 45 minutes, an hour tops, then all the interviews with higher ups, K9 unit (which I think was there to sniff for drugs honestly, to catch someone up to naughtiness outside the scope of the original search), and all the forensic CSI stuff, took the remaining time.
Slept like a rock, though I’m still feeling the effects a day later. I’m sure I’ll sleep well tonight again, and tomorrow I’ll be right as rain.
Dude. I made a lot of grammatical errors in this one. That’s a testament to just how completely wiped I was, I guess. I rarely proofread my posts before posting them, but I generally edit after posting once or twice immediately afterward. Even still, I don’t generally make as glaring of errors as “the adrenaline of the situation was still pumping”.
Yeah, the fact that I care tells you exactly how big the stick up my ass is.
To be honest I didn’t even notice any grammatical errors in the post. But as you know my mild dyslexia, and poor knowledge of grammar in general, means my writing is not the greatest on the planet so I never complain about anyone else’s.