31.1.06

Après moi, le déluge...

So as I was talking to Paula about WooLI stuff today in the office on my phone I hear a rather strange sound outside in the hall, much like that of a sprinkler hitting the side of your house in the summertime.... About a second later I realize that's probably not a sound one exactly wants to hear inside a building... About a second after that water begins slinking under the office door.... Luckily we had a hurricane snake* left over from Ivan (Fall '04) which I put on the floor and it seemed to stop the water. (Kind of a wimpy flood to say the least.) I called Teleeda in the main office to see if she knew what was happening because I didn't want to open my door and get sprayed if the flood was right outside and I couldn't tell from how it sounded. She couldn't tell from their end of the hall so I waited a bit and then gingerly opened the door. The flood was down the hall, outside Don Buck's and Dr. Nadar's offices (poor them) but water was still spraying down out of the ceiling, the leak apparently connected to some work they had been doing up there; it seemed to take about 10 minutes for the water to get turned off and oddly enough after it was off was when it REALLY started flooding in my office. Then when the cleaning crews were summoned and they dug in with their shop vacs the influx increased impressively. Shop vacs, while doing a great job on sucking up loads of water, are really effective artificial tide-makers as well and mini-whitecaps were rolling into 6064 taking the office floor from approximately 40%-flooded to more like 85%. Thank goodness it took about 10 more minutes for this increase because I by then realized our CPUs were in danger so I scrambled under Jenny's desk to unplug all the cords on hers and put it up on top of her desk. I couldn't reach to get the cords themselves out of the way but I flipped off the power strips and unplugged whatever I could. Mine was next and a couple of minutes later the water reached the floor where it had stood and immediately stopped its ingress. I put a couple of other things up from under the extra desk just in case anyway and then decided to leave things to the vacs... I grabbed whatever I could (pretty much my entire desk went into my bookbag) and took off to IMG to finish the 2 sizeable projects slated for the afternoon. (Wacky: it later dawned on me that the last time I had hightailed it to IMG for a mad dash at a deadline was when we had the Haley bomb threat in mid-October.) Never a dull moment in FLL.

Thank goodness I was there and thank goodness I am not very prissy but instead inherited that strong preference for practical-and-comfy-clothing from Mom.... I couldn't have been better prepared for such shenanigans than in my fun red Tevas and they quite enjoyed feeling like they were roughing it for a few minutes. (In fact my wool socks got wet, too, but not much. :)

* Those of you in hurricane areas might know what that is - those of you who are not picture those little under-door draft sausage-y things that are usually covered in Christmas fabric or made to look like an extra long weiner dog, but these are not filled with sand but with foam - usually we are issued these at AU when hurricanes are due to put in our windowsills to stop leaks from sideways rain, etc.

2 commentaires:

Applecart T. a dit…

my mom's job leases space from a place in w. st. louis that makes those absorbent products. i think they have some other techical name, maybe just sorbent products.

wow, what a little office adventure. was it in-house workers who goofed up, do you think?

a case for not putting CPUs on the floor, for sure. one never knows when there may be an inner building flood.

Susan a dit…

tee hee. I know! it's always the stuff you don't expect...

not so much worker error as crappy older-than-the-hills building heating/cooling systems apparently. par for the course here at Auburn unless you have the word "Athletic" in your dept name... grrr.