power cycled

The defunct halon system insistently beeped from its closet letting us know there was trouble. I had been in a meeting at 4:11 when we noticed the power went out. Our group was having a crazily productive brainstorm so we continued. By five we came out into the office and people were collected around a battery operating radio hearing speculation of terrorists and the extent of the blackout, about fires and meltdowns.

It didn't take long to figure out that the power was not coming back on and our office was getting hot. Not much to do for programmers in the dark, so I grabbed my bike and headed out.

Everyone else left work at more or less exactly the same time. The combination of no traffic signals and panicked people left Ann Arbor grid-locked. I sucked down a little extra exhaust zooming past everyone but was no worse for the experience. I heard some people spent 45 minutes in our parking lot alone. Yay two-wheel transport!

I would have taken more pictures during the blackout but ironically I had not charged my camera batteries.

Ann Arbor was a party town this Thursday night. Cell phones rarely worked (and so few of us have landlines now) making coordination next to impossible--people did what ever they were going to do. I met monkeys at Dave and Erika's house where the order of the evening was to eat and drink everything! Grilled meat, beer and booze. Thankfully ice was not too hard to come by.

As dark took the sky we headed downtown and wandered the street with the rest of town. Ice cream and open containers were prevalent, the mood was good. Cars seemed very strange because they were pretty much the only source of light and they wandered freely. We wandered through various offices watching huge UPSs give up and climbed to roofs to watch the world from above.

Dirt took some pictures during our wanderings.

It was a very muggy night, floating in a candle-let pool was an excellent end to the evening.

Power returned to my house by 11am and covered most of Ann Arbor by the end of the day. The power outage was a great break from the norm.