Fun-at-work blog.
Yesterday the outside temperature soared to the dizzy heights of 22C (72F)*. The 18 month old building I work in, which is only 70% occupied, tripped its main breaker at 5pm because the air-conditioning units were working so hard; fortunately my server room is on the separate smaller trip that also handles lifts and water pumping (there's no gravity-fed water in the building). The power was off for 75 minutes (the time it took someone authorised to touch the main breakers to reach the building). Those of you who work in wet labs with cultures and the like will know what serious damage such an outage can do to an experiment; the -80 freezers rose to -60 in that time; lots of people were very angry.
Today they were monitoring the power usage carefully. Not carefully enough, it seems - the outside temperature reached the unheard-of heights of 25C (77F)* and the trip went again at 4pm, and was out for an hour again.
The building manager is on holiday. I forsee a lot of recriminations and flying crap over the next few days. Tomorrow is supposed to bring thunderstorms, but Monday "hot" again.
I mentioned the pumped water. When we had an outside power cut, and everything went off, that meant no water to the sinks in the labs, and therefore no means to clean off contaminents from your hands - so officially people couldn't leave the labs...
Yes, the backup generators in the original design were removed as a cost-saving exercise.
* Yes, there is implied sarcasm there, in case you're not sure.