One of those days

Holy cow. I've just had about the most bizarre day ever. It was just one crazy thing after another.

First, I woke up around seven and noticed my alarm clock was off. Power failure. So I got up right away. If I hadn't, I'd probably have fallen back to sleep and made myself late for work. Then I discovered there was no hot water...can't take a shower. Ick. Figured I'd wait around till there was some hot water, or at least lukewarm, so I could shower, but when I tried to call the office to leave a message that I'd be in late, the phone just rang and rang. No voicemail pickup. Uh oh. Power must be out down at the office too.

So, might as well make the best of a bad situation. I decided to leave right away and go to McDonalds for a McGriddle and read a book till it was time to go to work for 9:00. Sure enough, all the traffic lights along the way are out, except for two, which must have their own generators, and the traffic is ridiculous. After half an hour (usually a seven minute drive) I get to McDonald's, shut off the car and start getting out. But just then I notice a woman trying to go in. The door is locked. She tried all three doors. All locked. They're closed! Ok then...might as well go to the office. Turn the key to start the car. Nothing. Not even a click-click-click of the battery.

Shite.

It's a bad day for electricity! I sat there for a few minutes, sweating, trying to figure out what to do. Finally looked around me and noticed a mechanic's shop right next door! Lucky break. I go over there and they're already open and sent a guy over right away with a portable battery to jump my car. He was having a really bad day too! He got my car started and I figured I might as well take the car over there and leave it with them so they could tell me what was wrong. And the guy that owns the place even offered to drive me to my office.

I get here, and the place is half deserted (well, I WAS pretty early). But we start to get reports, via the reporters of course, that the power failure started with the main provincial supplier...so that's a big deal. A little while later we hear that there are pockets of power failures all over the place, not just in Ottawa's east end, and whenever they got one pocket fixed, they'd go to the next and when they got that one fixed, the first one would go out again. And THEN we heard that it's going to be between 2pm and 6pm before they can get the electricity back on. I figured that was optimistic and it might end up being 8 or 9 pm.

Shite.

We have a newspaper that goes to press every Monday at five pm. And here we were, all six production staff, standing around with fuck-all to do because our computers won't run, and even if they did, the server's down, and EVERYTHING is on the server. We started batting around ideas. Maybe we can rent a couple of small generators. No, someone said, the power from those is too iffy and we might blow the computers. How about taking the server over to our office in Gatineau...they have power. No, our IT department told us last time this happened that we're not allowed to move the computer equipment. Well, maybe we can just take the backup tapes over to Gatineau and have our files restored onto their server and see if we can beg a computer or two over there to work on. Nope...would take way too long to restore the files, and there's probably not enough room for them on Gatineau's server anyway.

So we were back to waiting around. The big boss is phoning all over the place trying to figure out what we should do. Finally the IT folks tell us to unplug our server and haul it over to Gatineau. Myself and one of my staff volunteer to go over too, to work on the two spare workstations they had available, and we'd just do what we could till the power came back on over here and we could come back and finish up.

In the meantime, I've discovered that my cell phone is down to one red bar and is in imminent peril of shutting down completely. I decided to drive home and get a fresh battery before heading over to Gatineau. My cohort wanted to drive over on her own, so we agreed she would drive me over to pick up my car and then follow me home and then follow me to Gatineau...as I was the one with the directions. She took me over to the garage and they charged me $250 for a new battery and labour and tax. I'm pretty sure it shouldn't cost that much, but what could I do? Even worse is that I'd had to buy an emergency battery at the same place once before, for my old Pontiac, and they ripped me off that time too.

So next stop, home. My cohort followed me and waited while I ran upstairs (literally ...well, walked. Well...trudged) for the battery (and a much-needed pee). When I got to my floor, the emergency lights were on, so the hallway was dim, but lit, but then, halfway down the hall, ALL the lights went out and I was plunged into total blackness in the hallway. Instant panic, and the instant conviction that there was now, suddenly, a rapist hiding in the alcove right outside my apartment door. I held my breath and felt my way along the wall till I came to my own door and managed to get inside without further ado. Bugsy thought I'd come home to feed him. I ignored the poor thing completely, attended to Mother Nature, grabbed my spare battery and was back out the door in no time flat. The hall lights were back on, thank goodness. Downstairs, I programmed the Gatineau office's address into my TomTom, rallied my cohort who was parked in my laneway, and away we went.

Unfortunately, the TomTom isn't always as clear as it could be about which exit to take off of busy highways with multiple exit lanes in the same interchange. Of course, I took a wrong turn in Gatineau and had to execute what I later learned was an illegal U-turn so I could get back on course. My cohort told me I'd have had to pay her ticket had she gotten one for that. I agreed that would only have been fair.

So we finally make it to the Gatineau office and present ourselves to the receptionist, who dutifully takes us to stand in the middle of a rabbit warren of what appear to be sales reps' cubicles. All empty. What gives, I thought, the guy I talked to here told me they were swamped today. Where is everyone?? We stood there for about five minutes and finally their production manager appears from the lunchroom. What are YOU doing here, he says? We said we were here to start working. But, your power's back on in Ottawa, he answered! I reminded him that it was not April first, and he insisted that the power was back on and the bosses had gone back to Ottawa with the server fifteen minutes ago.

Shite.

No one CALLED us to tell us this! Here we were on a wild goose chase in friggin QUEBEC (I hate going there) and we don't even need to BE there. GRrrrrr.

Okay...turn around and head back to our own office. I finally got to stop at Mickey D's and picked up some lunch to eat at my desk. Everyone pitched in heroically and after losing the whole first half of the day, ended up being only 90 minutes late putting the paper to bed. Not bad! I love my team.

There is one final absurdity to report (so far). Around 3:00, we got this ad from a big client who sends their art in ready-to-go. But when we tried to process it on our page, the colour elements were just vanishing. Strange. The original was just a Photoshop Tiff file, so I opened it up and had a look and everything seemed to be in order...except there was some funny business going on in the Channels palette. I won't go into the technical details. Suffice to say it was the WEIRDEST thing I ever saw and we couldn't fix it no matter what we tried....and we tried a lot of different things. There's almost always a way to get around problems with submitted artwork, especially simple stuff like Photoshop files. We finally had to get hold of the guy who sent it to us, and even he had to redo the file four times before it would work properly. I still don't really understand what was wrong with it.

Good lord. I'm wiped out...totally done in. I don't remember the last time I had a day as crazy as this. I just hope the craziness is all over, because all I want to do is go home, get out of my clothes and flop on the couch with the cat and a few hours worth of Battlestar Galactica DVDs. Just my luck, there will be an Old Home Week parade outside my window, complete with drums and cymbals and cheering crowds, and a neighbour's barbecue will spark and set my deck chair on fire on the balcony. Or some such other bizarre nonsense.

Wish me luck.