A lot can happen in the space of a week, the past week has been proof of that.
It all started early, early morning on Sunday the 18th. It was 6:00 or so in the morning when I hear a banging at my bedroom door.
"Mickey, your boss is on the phone." I glance at the clock and get a bearing. Sunday morning, I think. Right?
"Go to bed," I snap back at him. I mean, it's gotta be a joke, right?
"No, really Dude," he hands me the phone.
"Mickey, it's Darwin." Wow, no shit. "We have an issue. Seems that a water mane broke down at the office and there's six inches of water running through the entire place." I don't say anything. I really don't know what to say. I had just woken up, the caffiene from the night before is barely still running through my veins. "You don't have to," he continues, "but it'd be great if you could go down there and assess the situation."
My job, amongst many other things, is the main PC technician for the Alumni Relations Division at the University of Vermont. Six inches of water in my entire office was not a good thing, and good thoughts did not cross my mind. Little did I know that the computers were going to be the least of the issues that followed in the next week.
"Alright," I told him. "I'll go check it out." The phone call ended with an apology for the early telephone call. I could deal with the telephone call, it was the getting up and going into work on a Sunday that really sucked, but I realized what I needed to do and got up and drove the five minutes to the office.
It was just as bad as I had imagined when I got there. Water was easily up to my mid-shin in most places, and the unevenness of the floor was very apparent. By the time I arrived, our server room was already bailed out. Sandbags blocked the doors, and most of the water had been removed. Fortunate for us, all of our servers are on wheels which raised them over the water level. Other than removing the water that was in there and making sure no other water made it's way to them, work there was done.
The method for removing the water from the server room was load after load of 12-14 gallon wet-vacs. This worked ok, as the server room may be a little more than 100 square feet, and water was stopped from entering the room by sandbags at the door. The thing is, after the water was removed from that room, the people who work for the property management company decided that using the three or four wet-vacs would be the best way to remove the water from the rest of the office.
So as I went cubicle to cubicle to save as many computers as I could, the other workers bailed out our 4000+ square foot office space, 14 gallons at a time, with total disregard that the entire 50,000 square foot first floor had standing water. At this point, the only way to remove the water that was present would be to use high-end specialized pumps and equipment made for water removal. Of course I didn't say anything to them, it really wasn't my place.
The next few hours were spent clearing the floor of all computers. Many CPUs had water in them and they needed to be drained. All computers were opened and allowed to air out and dry. I hoped that after a good drying, most of the computers would work like nothing happened. After that it was but a waiting game. I spent a little bit more time at work picking up peoples' personal items that may have been on the floor, then I went home, Sunday already spent having got up at 6:00 in the morning.
Stayed tuned for "The Flood (Part 2) - The Aftermath"...
