My mind, and the places it goes

Our disposal has been cranky for a bit, and on Friday, right before Shabbat, it gave up the ghost. Through a series of circumstances irrelevant to this discussion, our building has had to cut its ties to the plumber we used to use (who, honestly, none of us were overly thrilled with). So mabfan, who had compiled a list of plumbers recommended by the denizens of the Jewish Boston mailing list, chose one off the list and called him yesterday afternoon.( Plumbing the depths? )

Seen crossing perpendicular to our building this afternoon around 4 PM, as lucretia_borgia was dropping me off:

Turkey!
Again, Turkey!

Oddly enough, as lucretia_borgia remarked when we spotted said turkey, I'd just been in conversation not ten minutes previous with a few members of our shul regarding the population of wild turkeys seen around Brookline and Brighton.

For the second time this week, I was on a bus this morning that had an ad poster pasted on the inside of the bus roof. Is this some new strategy from the T? Both buses in question were on the 66 route, during the morning rush hour. The only good way to read the ads that I could figure out would be to lie on the floor of the bus and look up. And the new buses barely have enough room for people to stand when the seats are all occupied. I can't imagine what the crowding would be like if someone were lying on the bus floor!

So there we were, sitting in the conference room, when the power goes out...and doesn't come back. And doesn't come back. And doesn't come back.

We sit around looking at each other. After all, this is a high-tech company. Without power, how can we work? How can we contact the outside world? How can we do much of anything, honestly.

We look out the window at Kendall Square, much of which is dark. We see people randomly evacuating some of the MIT buildings. Those in my cube neighborhood wander back to our desks to look outside at the power plant behind our building. We all pull out our cell phones and start calling folk who we know that work in this general area. Some have power; some had no power; some had been having a blackout but had just gotten power back.

We stand around. We shmooze. We wander over toward the elevator lobby. We're much more social with our fellow coworkers than we've been in months.

Eventually, building security announces over the (annoying) PA system that the power company is aware of the problem and that there's a "voluntary evacuation" going on. We look around at each other some more, deciding whether or not to evacuate. Some strong climbers make it up the 13 floors and emerge from the stairwells. We hail them as returning heroes. Or nutcases. Opinions vary.

We stand around some more, anticipating more information. Elevators start running again, many folks emerge from newly-returning elevators. "Great," we think. "Power is coming back.

It remains dark. We stand around and shmooze some more, giggling slightly at the buildingwide announcement that power has been restored. We apparently don't deserve electricity.

Eventually, after more shmoozing, the lights come back on. The assembled multitude applauds. We disperse to see what's going on at our desks.

No e-mail; no Internet access; no access to internal servers. Thus, if none of your work is saved locally, not much to do other than stare at your screen.

Finally, Internet access comes back. Thus, this update. But still no internal e-mail, still no access to our company's internal servers.

(and it's the 27th day of the Omer)