Too true January 16, 2009 at 2:32 am
Today’s Schlock Mercenary is a good analogy for how I feel on more days than I would like to admit. Kinda like today.
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So there’s this power outage. Some power poles snapped (Duke Energy says they don’t know way, but it seems to me that given the extremely cold temperatures the likes of which we haven’t seen in years, the power poles probably got very brittle and any moisture inside them froze in the -14° and snapped [at least that's probably what happened to one, the other three were probably pulled down by it], but who knows, maybe somebody hit them with a car) and plunged 2600 people in Huntington into the dark and cold, including the campus of my University (I live half a mile from campus and am literally 2 blocks from the power outage zone, words can not describe how glad I am that I still have power). Now, originally there was a rumor that it would be fixed by 1am, but it’s now 2am and Duke is still reporting 2,652 people in the dark, including Huntington University. So the big million dollar question of the night is: how soon will the power get back on, and will classes be canceled in the morning (it’s January-Term where we have only two class times every day: 9am-11am and 1pm-3pm, I’m in a 9am class…meeting in 6.7 hours)? Duke says they don’t know how long it’ll take to fix the power poles, and even if that’s the only issue causing the blackout since there are some outages nearby, as well, so it could be hours…or it could be in 10 minutes and the classrooms will have time to rewarm and nobody will ever know that we had no power (except those poor students in the dorms who are probably freezing too death right now).
Personally speaking, I think that since a lot of students probably didn’t have time to do their homework, sleep or really think about their morning (or afternoon) classes at all this evening/night (power’s been out since before 8pm), that classes should be canceled, but then, if they were, who would know? The e-mail server went down with everything else and we have no way of being told if classes are on or not (different Q: why does an organization of hundreds of people that hosts all it’s own web and e-mail servers not have a back-up generator for said servers?). At least we commuters don’t have any way of knowing…the on-campus students will know from their RAs and RDs. Of course, I’m willing to bet that with no power for 6+ hours and a temperature cold enough to melt brain tissue (I guess it just feels that way, but anyway…) some of the students in the dorms have gone to a local church that has opened their (much warmer) doors to any HU students who want to actually be warm tonight, and are therefore out of the loop in terms of being told about the morning class status.
In short: it’s all a big mess and I want to know if I should do my homework for the morning or just not, plus if I can sleep in in the morning.
Alas, I don’t think I’ll be getting answers to any of those questions within the next few hours. What a shame.
And they were just talking about installing an emergency student contact system using txting…seems like this is a good endorsement of that idea, plus the idea of having a back-up power supply on the networking equipment.
Hmm.
-j
I wanted to comment and thank the author, good stuff