Excitement in the Office

BOOM! Actually, it was more of a POOF!! I was sitting at my desk, working, when all of the sudden there was a loud electrical explosion in the cubicle next to me.  A power transformer overheated and blew up.  It wasn't a very violent explosion - there wasn't any deadly shrapnel, but it killed the power to about half of the floor.  About 30 simultaneously stood up and looked around confused and probably a bit disgruntled as all their computers shut off.  I should have been unaffected, but the battery in my laptop is good for about 2 seconds after the plug is pulled, so even I was affected by the power loss.

As everyone is starting to question what happened, we noticed a smell.  It smelled like an electrical fire and just following the smell led us right to the smoking transformer.  I am not surprised that it came from the desk next to me; I actually thought it was going to happen sooner or later.  I really do not know what they guy next to me does, but he has at least five or six random circuit boards, an oscilloscope, at least ten meters of wire in various lengths, and other random electronic bits scattered all over his desk.  Among that mess is also his computer and random paper work pushed about.

  After the initial "What Happened?!?" wore off, we started to look for the circuit box on the floor, completely ignoring the big door about twenty feet away that said "ELECTRICAL ROOM".  And then as if something drew all of our attention, everyone looked at the door and said, maybe we should check in there.  Two guys went in and flipped the breaker, and then the whirr of power began to hum once again.  But, it was hard to get back to work with the excitement still in the air. The funny part is that guy wasn't ever there when it happened.  He didn't come back until 10 minutes later after the power was turned back on and everyone was still congregating around his desk talking about it.   He was very confused and when he saw that his equipment was off and somehow he saw that he was missing one transformer; well he started asking where is it?!  Someone had brought it over to the other side of the office near a garbage can to throw it out.  Well, he was not very happy about that, but once he saw that it was fried, he moved on...

I think that was the most excitement that this office has seen in a while.  Now it is about 40 minutes after the incident, and things have returned to normal.   Back to work I guess.  Before I go, I will leave you with some numbers.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional with MSDN Library--> $1,030.99

Microsoft Expression Studio 2 -->: $349.99

Getting it all for free through Penn State and MSDN --> Priceless

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