[… in reply to a note from my brother Jim …]
Message received and noted. Damn the bastids. However, we remain balanced with equanimity due to a healthful residue of blissful ignorance.
Apropos the delayed reply, though, here’s today’s fun chain of unanticipated consequences:
While we were gone, we paid a neighbor’s kid, M., to mow the lawn once a week. Monica was actually here the first week. We had one of her friends, J., staying in the house the following week to watch the dogs and pool and so on, when Monica joined us in Belize. As you know, we were kind of out of touch that week, though we found out on the way home that there had been a problem. J. had called that the air conditioning had gone out upstairs. She called Cathy. Cathy called an a serviceman, who called an electrician. Everyone had called me and left messages on my mobile phone, while I remained happily unaware, spearfishing my jubilee dinner, or conversing with a bush doctor over some maybe surprising secret lore of zericote wood.
What? Because apparently overzealous in his duties as lawnmower boy, M. also mowed right over the power line feeding the a/c. Ka-pow!
The unanticipated part? Evidently, the surge blew out the disks of one of our primary computers. To tell you the truth, I don’t really know that was the cause. All I know is that when we came home, both disks were as well as the bulb on the lamp on the desk were dead, but the computer itself would boot with a replacement disk. (turns out I’ve got a sackful of ’em.) So it’s a drag, but not that bad, because a certain party backed up all the data just before we left, and the server is fine and well, thank you very much.
The moral of this story? Aside from the obvious — that the real world will bleed you dry and then kick you in the ass just out of spite, so the hell with it? Just go have a good time and ignore it. Maybe it will go away.
I don’t know. But I can tell you this: the server is protected by a heavier duty surge protector with a thing called an uninterruptible power supply. Basically it’s a glorified battery. Get one.