It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

What a day I had yesterday. After getting no more than 2 hours of sleep the night before due to the storms, I dragged my tired self to work to begin my nearly 14 hour work day. The first 8 hours went by pretty quickly and easily, as it was just my normal daily routine. Then the next 6 hours got more interesting and tiring.

Our company was hosting a big event. The grounds crew had been working in overdrive getting this place picture perfect, and sales and marketing team diligently prepared every detail. My duties entailed being one of the building tour guides, as well as the photographer/videographer. I wasn't sure which part was making me more nervous. Its been 11 years since I gave building tours and to say I'm a little rusty on the details was an understatement. OK, so you're probably thinking, "Paula, you should know your way around the building by now, what is so hard?" The tours really revolve around one topic: the super green aspects of this amazing building. So rather than me just pointing out the shipping room, the bike room, the gym, the museum, etc. I have to explain the geothermal system, the solar array, how we convert the energy, all the stats on how much energy we create, how we use our excess hot air to heat our water, how many wells we have, etc. It's a lot to know and remember and people are so interested in this stuff that they drill you with questions. I hope all the answers I made up last night are close to true!

So I took off on my very first tour of the night around 5 PM. I had 6 guys to cart around and just when we got to the basement in front of one set of the heat pumps, the blaring fire alarm goes off nearly deafening all of us. Now I got 6 grown men dancing around with their fingers in their ears and I'm not quite sure what to do. We made a mad dash through the basement and upstairs to get outside. Only problem was that when we made it to the big glass doors we could see that it was black outside, pouring buckets, and the trees were standing at 45 degree angles. I decided I would take my chances with the potential flames than risk being blown away. Apparently it was the smoke from the outside barbecue that blew toward the smoke detectors that triggered the alarm. That poor chef. He so deserved some hazardous duty pay last night.

Everybody settled down from the big excitement and I took off on my second tour. What do you think happens next? The power goes off. Luckily I was not in what would have been the pitch dark basement this time. And I'm also happy that I wasn't in the machine shop where 7 massive CNC machines came to a screeching halt. This event sure was getting interesting!

I ran around all night doing my thing, documenting the event. During the boring presentation parts I hung out in the shop taking pictures. I had to get my daily photo assignment done and snapped some pics of metal parts. So exciting, I know!


Then I took some pictures of our Applications Engineers hard at work at their machines.

Karlo used to be an Applications Engineer, but last year he was promoted to Product Management . . . so now this is pretty much what he does in his management position.

After running around that building for 5 hours (in my super cute Athena Alexander sandals) my feet were barking and I was exhausted (too tired to drive home). It was finally time to call it quits. Now we had two cars at work, my nice and dry MINI Cooper and the Jeep that had the windows rolled down all day and only the little bimini top on it. For some reason (that seemed perfectly logical last night) we decided to drive the Jeep home. I scored us two huge garbage bags to sit on since the seats were positively soaked. After painstaking setting up my bag perfectly on the seat so no piece of my rear end or back would get wet we took off. Karlo backed the Jeep up 3 feet and 3 GALLONS of cold water came pouring (like a waterfall) onto my lap, in my purse, and all over my phone (thank God I left the camera in the office). You should have heard me scream. I was soaked to the bone, while Karlo was dry as can be. Uuuuuuugh. A 30 minute commute of shivering non-stop. I just couldn't wait to get home to a warm shower . . . .

But, of course, that wasn't gonna happen. We arrived home to no power. And when you live in the country that means no running water, nor plumbing. Great. Just great. I peeled my clothes off and wrung them out, dried off and plopped into bed in our hot and stuff bedroom . . . listening to the purr of our neighbor's generator (we never did fix ours, dammit). Within an hour we must have also lost our phone line because now our security system is blaring a communication error. I wanted to cry.