So I went into work as normal. Get there and it’s dark inside. Plus the emergency lighting and exit signs were dark. That’s because I believe their batteries wore out a long time ago.

As of 9:30AM I was told I could go home as the power wasn’t on yet and the battery on my laptop was about to blink out.

So I was home by 12:30PM. Yeah I know – it included an hour wait in South Station.

Now here’s something I noticed. I may ding National Grid here in Rhode Island on a frequent basis, but at the very least National Grid maps their outages and updates status on them. NStar in Cambridge just shows a list. It’s sort of stupid.

The servers were up though – they’re powered by a huge UPS and backed up by a generator. But the power had been out since 10:30PM the night before and most diesel systems of a small size get about twelve hours of power.

I did make the forethought to dismount all the drives on the systems I’m responsible for, that way they won’t get damaged if power is abruptly cut.