So. I'm in the middle of the busiest time of year at work, with a STACK of files I have to put together and get on orders by mid-June... I'd been ignoring the constant weather alert popups from ForecastFox because every time I checked them they were flood warnings. Yes. It rained. It was going to rain some more. After the 4th wettest May on record, of course there was going to be flooding.
Well, colour me surprised when
strangemuses IMed me to warn me we had a Tornado Watch until 8pm. Yeep!
I checked the radar and saw the nasty storms heading for our area from West Virginia, and sent out a warning to everyone in the office since they probably also weren't keeping an eye on things, and then I went back to working.
About 3pm, the storms got to our area, and the lights started blinking. Of course, because our office can't get any replacement UPS and mine is toast, my computer went off right in the middle of a huge e-mail I was typing...
The lights and power kept blipping for about 5 minutes, and then WHAM. Off. *sigh* No power in the building -- other than the emergency lights, that is. Which also meant no getting in once you left, because the door locks are card-swipe things, and with no power, no card reader. This also meant no access to the bathrooms...
We stayed for a little bit, because the last time this happened they forced us to stay 2 hours before dismissal. This time, they used their brains and let us go, but I still had to try to get today's orders closed since I had a guy who was effective today, and we can't have him on tomorrow's orders with today's date -- not quite legal to back-date these things. One of the officers has a snazzy skinny Mac with pretty good wireless reception so we tried to use that, but he couldn't get a connection. *sigh*
I called the contractors to find out if there was a way to close tomorrow with today's date, and the guy I talked to wasn't sure. So I figured if we had power back home I'd do it from there, at least.
And then we headed home.
It took about an hour to get back because lights were out ALL OVER. There's a HUGE intersection that's I think 2 6-lane roads (although I think one of them is actually 7 or 8 lanes including turn lanes at that point...) that was the ONLY intersection that had cops directing traffic. Yay? (Good thing they were there -- I can imagine the mess it would have been otherwise!) There are a number of trees down, luckily none IN the road in this area this time...
But luckily, when we got home the lights were on and the AC was working. I logged on and got the work stuff finished, sent an e-mail to some of my coworkers to tell them what happened, and then we looked at the weather and found out the next round was coming. We got offline and figured we'd take a nap because we were still wiped from yesterday, and as we went off to bed the thunder was rumbling around and around and just not stopping at all!
I'm a little worried about work tomorrow, because apparently all the schools in the county are closed because they don't have power. OPM hasn't shut the government, because obviously some places do have power and some don't. BUT, since our building was toast today, I'm not sure it'll be back tomorrow. I'll have to call someone up when we get up to find out, I guess. If it's not, and I miss another day, I'm going to HAVE to be in there on the weekend, because seriously, 20 files to get done in 8 days? EEEEK!!! (Especially as with dual processing, that's actually 40 orders I have to get done...)
Oh yeah -- and that's if it didn't fry my computer this time...
And still, we're far better off than the folks further south, where the Tornado Watch turned into a Tornado Warning, and they had MUCH worse damage... Yikes!
worried
