Apocalyptico

HOLY SHIT!!!

I am duly impressed. I knew this part of the state was prone to moody and severe weather from time to time. I have seen torrential downpour followed by golden delicious sunshine. I sweated out some nearly 100 degree days and we have had several inches of snowfall on our front lawn since we've lived here. But WOW, this last wind storm was fantastic.

I was out on-call Sunday morning when the wind started picking up. With a wary eye to the towering trees I ventured out of my work van to a customer's front porch. I spent about 10 minutes inside troubleshooting and isolated the trouble. When I headed back outside the wind was blowing so hard I had to hold my hat on my head and it was a challenge to open the door on my van. That was the little storm...

Sunday night the shnickety hit the fizzan. We had some power outages during the day and we had generators running the remote sites to keep people's phones working. I was supposed to go out and fuel up generators Sunday night but I was really reluctant to do it. My boss and I were going to go together but I think he smelled the fear on me and let me off the hook (forgive the telco humor). He went out and met one of our other guys. I was happy to head home and hang with wifey.

We have been doing storm cleanup for 3 days now. I fixed 911 on Tuesday when it was brought to my attention that it was not working properly. Due to a fiber cut in Qwest's network we lost our long distance capabilites and internet access. We have internet back as of this afternoon but I think Qwest has an SS7 (a channel dedicated to carrying long distance call routing information) problem and our long distance is still not working. I spent a couple of hours today trying to figure out if we could reroute our long distance traffic over our microwave shot to Raymond... it pretty much can't be done. Hopefully tomorrow.

I wasn't even able to return the calls from my doctor's office but they were able to contact me today. It looks like my knee surgery will be within the next couple of weeks. I'll keep you posted.

Thaksn fro reidang my crapppola!!

-R