quinn222

Yesterday was busy but not crazy and things got fairly quiet in the mid/late afternoon. One thing that happens at my job is that all day long I get 'alarms' from the various points on the network. If someone unplugs something or plugs something new in, or there is a power spike or a failure or whatever. It's a way to stay informed or to know that the guys in the field need you to do something or whatever. So we're sitting there quietly in the office yesterday. It was raining. Suddenly we started getting alarms. 700 alarms in less than 2 minutes. The head IT guy behind me was reading off what was happening as the rest of us were trying to figure out why everything on the network was going down all at once. Then he and the chief engineer were charging out of the office and heading for the head end. We took a direct lightening strike and it took out two lasers. Fried one totally and knocked the other one out. Our network is entirely fiber driven. Everything on those two lasers went down. What a mess.

So now I have experience with catastrophic failure. Go me.