There are certain things about Nashville which would drive a Baptist minister to drink - in public. One of these things is the entity known as NES. Whenever NES isn't out butchering trees, apparently they're arbitrarily turning off power to entire city blocks. Granted, we had a storm the other night. Granted, there were a lot of people without power, and there was a transformer damaged. But notifying Vanderbilt 15 minutes after you've already done it that there will be "intermittent" power outages, then leaving the power off for an hour and a half, just doesn't seem Kosher to me. Blakemore is very busy street, as is 21st. I know that the traffic lights on Blakemore between Natchez and 21st were out, no police presence, just reliance that folks driving in Nashville would know to treat the intersections as 4-way stops. Since I swear two-thirds of the population doesn't understand the concept of a 4-way stop, this was a bad idea. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the battery backups on our switches failed, which we took as an omen and promptly shut down all the servers. Then we waited. We made a handful of phone calls to notify all those we could think of who logged into any of our three servers for any reason that we had an outage with no end in sight. Then, just as we thought we were going to get to call it a day and go home, lo and behold, there was light, and it was good. I made them wait another 10 or so to make sure it wasn't going to blip back off, then we brought everything up. So far, "intermittent" seems to mean "out for an hour and a half straight", not "on again, off again." Which is a good thing for me.

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