Yesterday at about 4:30 in the afternoon, we had the briefest of power outages at the office. I’m not sure if it was related to the thunderstorms that have been rolling through the area this week or if someone hit a telephone pole somewhere. It didn’t last too long as everything was back up and running within 20 seconds or so.
No big deal right ? Not so fast.
I tried to start up my workstation and was completely unable login to the network. I tried everything I knew to remedy the situation and then called our computer consultant who walked me through everything he could on the phone to try to get me back on the network. No luck in either case so our computer guy came in this afternoon.
It turns out that the power surge from the outage fried the network interface card in my computer. Cost to replace ? $ 20, no big deal….and I’ve been able to use one of the secretary’s workstations to get work done. There has been a dent in productivity, though, in not having access to my email and some of my files.
And, yes, I did have surge protection on my workstation. Our computer consultant told me that most surge protectors aren’t really worth the money you pay for them and suggested we look in Consumer Reports for the ones that actually have been tested and proven to work.
Just another day at the office.
