Local Government at It's Finest!

So I made my way to work today early as I had a big deadline to meet. After arriving, I got settled in and was on a role, when our entire building lost power about 9:30 am. Me, being a yank looked around and said 'when does the generator kick on'? I got this long blank stare and then was told it was not America with a big laugh!

Since our floor is structured with all the desks by the windows, we had more then enough light to keep working. We all have laptops, so the laptops were still working since they were running on battery power. So I continued to work on my laptop until about 45 minutes later when my battery went dead. The funny thing about the situation, is no one knew anything. There were no announcements, there was no one who came to our floor. My Deputy Director stopped by and say 'oh, the power is out.' What I did know is that the fire trucks had arrived since there were people trapped in the 6 elevators of my building (which is 18 floors high and houses 3,200 employees).

As more and more people began to have their batteries go out, we finally got an announcement around noon (yes, 2 1/2 hours later) saying there was a power surge and they were trying to restore power floor by floor. They said power would be up and running by 1:30 pm. Since I had a meeting at 2:30, I decided to go out for lunch with a few other employees. Now, to go to lunch, I had to walk down 16 flights of stairs in heels. And get this, half of the emergency lighting in the stairwells were out so it was pitch dark!!!!!! We slowly made it down the stairs and went out to lunch. When we returned to the building, they then told us we were not allowed back in! They said they were trying to control the number of people in the building. Well, since we could not go back in, we walked across the street and had some coffee/tea at a shop. We basically waited until we saw people going back into the building. This happened around 2 pm. Finally, we could get back to work!

But, instead, when we arrived, we were told there was still no power in the building and people needed to return to their desks and lock up their stuff and then work from home. You got to be kidding. So we then had to walk up 16 flights of stairs in the pitch dark again (in heels)!!!!!!!!!!! Can we say lawsuit.

Let's just say that by the time I walked back down the 16 flights again, I was in a lot of pain. We all said our goodbyes and I took the hour trip home to work. The whole time, I kept thinking how inefficient these people were. Everyone of us has a computer and cell phone. Our entire Council is build on the idea of working at home. I find it odd that no one told us to go home about 2 hours into the ordeal. If I was at GAO, I would have heard an announcement, and then been told by a manager to go home after an hour. In the end, none of this would have happened anyways.....since GAO has backup generators!

Funny enough, when I finally got home at 3:30 pm, I could not get on to the network since the servers were down! Bloody local government!