You know the old saying. Maybe it’s just me but, I don’t think it meant 12:30am to 12:49am the same morning.

On most week nights, I turn in around 11pm. However, Mym had a presentation to give on Thursday that went until 11:30pm, so I decided to wait up for him to see how it went. He got home just after midnight, it went well, we hit the sack.

Twenty minutes later, my cell phone rang. It was one of our vendors at work calling to tell me that some of the network stuff they monitor for us wasn’t responding. I called the point person for that area on our team to let them know and went back to bed. Five minutes later, I kicked myself back out to check my side of the network. Just in case. The critical stuff was all fine. I couldn’t get to some of the less critical items, but it made sense given the initial call so I decided to wait around a little bit for further developments. When 2 o’clock rolled around and I hadn’t heard anything, my eyelids army crawled themselves back up the stairs to my fluffy pillow, dragging my body behind.

4am. Another phone call. The power was out at one of our buildings and all hands were needed on deck by 0600. Oh, and the main street is closed, so you’ll need to come in the back way. When I got there at 5, I found this lovely scene outside the front door. Turns out, some kid driving a van had fallen asleep at the wheel at about 12:30am. He rammed the power pole outside our building’s front door so hard that it not only crumpled like a 3rd grader in front of the 4th grade bully, but it took its best friend down with it.

The power was out in the building for a mere five hours and kudos must be given to the local utility companies for all their hard work to get us back up and running so quickly while they continued to sort out the mess. We got everything on our end back online before the normal workday started, but it was not my favorite way to start a Friday, especially since it didn’t end until 6pm Saturday due to secondary fallout from the event.