A Day of Outage
Today has been a rather eventful day.
This morning at around 7.50am, the power went off in my house in Maynooth. I looked at the ESB network site and it informed me that a large area was affected, extending as far as Celbridge. I could hear burglar alarms ringing all around the estate, evidently triggered by the interruption to the mains supply. I am aware
I had actually just got out of bed when the failure happened but, there being no electricity to make breakfast nor to have a shower, the ESB indicating that it would take until 9am to fix the “outage”, and being unable to function without at least one coffee, I took the obvious course of action and went back to bed. In fact the power came on well before 9am so I had my breakfast and shower, then went around resetting the clocks on various bits of equipment.
It was only when I looked at the burglar alarm that I realized that the power cut had fried its circuits and I could not reset it. I therefore had to search around the internet for someone to come and fix it.
While I was looking on the internet for a company that would deal with the alarm system I have, I checked my work email and discovered that a the new TSI building had no power at around 9.30am. Whether that was connected with the larger problem I don’t know for sure, but it took longer to fix. I don’t know whether any other buildings on campus were affected either. I only received notification that power had been restored just after 11am.
Unfortunately there were a large number of repeat examinations due to take place in the building at 9.30, none of which could go ahead; those papers are now deferred until 10th August. None of the repeat examinations to be taken by students in the Department of Theoretical Physics were scheduled in that slot, so our students were unaffected, but over 300 other students in other Departments were inconvenienced.
P.S. my domestic burglar alarm is now fixed and functioning properly, in case you had any ideas…
In the Dark 
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