Image via Wikipedia On Friday afternoon, the electricity to my home (and thus my home office) blew out. TOTALLY. No electric whatsoever. The neutral wire leading in to the house was bad and it caused one of the two other lines to carry too much voltage. It ended up causing 3 mini-fires in the house. We lost a digital converter box for our TV, our Windows PC started on fire (although remarkably the hard drive is ok), and our wirelss router stopped working.
On Saturday, we got the electricity back up and working by rewiring the 3 faulty wires coming to the house and I replaced the wireless router and the digital cable box. Not 12 hours later though, did unprecedented wind storms roll through Central and Southeast Ohio. I was actually in Columbus for the day at the zoo with my daughter when the windstorms hit. It was unbelievable. It was actually comparable to what I saw when Hurricane Katrina was going on. The winds got up to 70mph, trees were thrown everywhere and power was out for the 80 mile drive from Columbus back to my home. And when I walked in the door…no power. Again. This time it meant that I wouldn’t be able to send out the training plans that I send out every Sunday to a handful of clients and HPC Elite athletes. So today, I drove in to my favorite Athens coffee shop hoping that they’d have power…and they did.
Although I’ve gone much longer stretches of time without electricity, it was either not as big of a deal or I had alternative options (like driving in to LSU where they have their own power plant on campus). Now, I’m in the unique situation that 90% of my business is done via the web. This requires both a working computer and an internet connection. Both of which require electricity.