Powerless

Welcome, empowered reader, as today I take you on a journey known as 'Tuesday'. It's not much of an adventure if I'm honest, but in the true spirit of under-promise and over-deliver, prepare yourself for this tale of pandemic life.

Tuesday was the day the power went off in our house. Now this was entirely scheduled, as the City of Palo Alto had told us they were doing maintenance on local power infrastructure:

Come Tuesday morning, a veritable phalanx of trucks and workers turned up in the street, and as if by magic, bang on at 8am the power went off.

Now I'm not sure if you've noticed, but everyone is working from home these days using these computer jobbies and this internet thing, so a domestic power interruption meant I was somewhat challenged to continue with my work. But hey, reader, I don't end up in these situations unprepared: I've got two work laptops, fully charged, and two phones which I can tether with to access the internet, plus some batteries to recharge the phones. I thought I was reasonably well set up to do what passes for a day's work for me.

Anyway, here's how it unfolded: firstly, the screen went on one of my laptops about a week ago, so we were down to one computer. And it turns out an hour of email followed by an hour-and-a-half of video calls is enough to empty the battery on the other laptop.

Never fear, because I had the power of PHONES. These mighty little pocket computers can do anything, can't they? Well yes, they can do anything that their innate physical restrictions allow. This means they're a fairly sub-optimal way to consume group video calls where someone is presenting a slideshow, assuming you can read it on a 27" monitor.

So, dear reader, we made it to about 11am. And at that point I resolved to do something I haven't done for 8 months, to visit a place that is talked about in legends and hushed tones only: the office.

A few months ago, when someone had set their background in one video meeting to a picture of our office, I had jokingly said, "Does anyone know if it's actually still standing?". The campus I work on is a bit out of the way, in the middle of nowhere in an industrial park, somewhere that you wouldn't really go unless you're working there. Of course, that means no-one has been there since early March.

When I got to the office, well, let's say I didn't have a lot of trouble parking. In fact, on this huge campus, where normally several thousand people work, I didn't see a single human being for the several hours I was there. The place has clearly been set up for COVID-compliant working - all the doors are propped open so you don't have to touch surfaces, and the meeting rooms all have an approved occupancy number written on the door. And yet no-one was there.

Given that, you might have a mental image of me fighting through cobweb-strewn corridors before arriving at a desk that is covered in 8 months worth of dust. But everything was clean, and in particular there was no dust on the desk at all. I'm not sure if this is because the place is still being cleaned, or because things don't get dusty if there are no people around; I suspect it's the former, but I don't really know. Otherwise everything was working as normal, except obviously there was nothing in the fridges and no baristas or even a working coffee machine, so clearly the visit needed to be kept as short as it could possibly be.

Overall it was a strangely familiar-yet-novel experience. It was a familiar space, and I quite enjoyed having a bit more of an opportunity to stretch my legs, but the lack of people there was strange.

Oh, and we also learned that the fire alarms in our house have a full repertoire of little tricks up their sleeve, including talking to you! They can both tell you there's a high carbon monoxide level, and that there's a fire. Now, when they say "carbon monoxide", what they actually mean is "mains power has been off for 30 minutes", so it's perhaps not the most accurate set of warnings, but you can't have everything in this world. To shut them up, I removed the batteries, which meant they started beeping again when the power came back, and needed a full reboot (including going through that entire repertoire of noises and spoken alerts) to give us a bit of peace.

But there's an upside to all this: having been to the office, I was able to retrieve my loudhailer, so should there actually be a fire in the house I'll be in a great position to take charge and raise the alarm effectively with all concerned. Every cloud, reader, every cloud!