Using the old noggin

Walking back from the laundry room, I had a sudden moment of clarity. If the power is back on in the building, the answering machine should also come back on.

So I get back inside, and call the lab. Sure enough, answering machine picks up.

So sometime after 9:30PM and 7:30AM the power was restored. I'm looking forward to reading the email that'll explain the incident. But then again, nobody bothered to send an email after a dumbass smoker set a dumpster on fire to say "no smoking around the building - go to the smoking tent".

So that's one less thing to do this morning. Yup, I'm not going to bother because what damage is done is done, and there's not much I can do about it now since everything should be at the proper temperature.

Cake is in oven, laundry is started. I might get a nap in this morning after all. Score.

What a crock!

So I get to my lab building. It's completely dark except for the fresh air intake fans that are running.

I start running into people immediately that say "completely dark," and "trying to find space for stuff." I call security to let me into my floor. I wait 45 minutes and they still hadn't shown up.

After 45 minutes, I run into a couple guys that work on my floor. One of them has a stairwell key. So we set off to try and find a way into a stairwell. Oddly enough, the card reader on the second floor stairwell is working. So we huff it up the stairs to the sixth floor, and get into the building.

Sharing my Mag light that I brought, they pull out some things that they can't afford to have spoil and leave. I set off to find space in working -80 freezer because my freezer kindly informs me that it's already at -60.

Though the fresh air intake fans are working, there's no ventilation in the building. And we're on the top floor. So after a couple hours, it was already warm and sticky. At least I recover my stairwell key.

In my desperate searching for space in -80 freezers, I run into another person in my department. He's the one that suggested to get some dry ice. I know a grocery store that sells dry ice. It's by my house.

So I run across town, and load up 25 pounds of dry ice. Run it back across town. Haul it back upstairs. Load chunks of it in the freezers, fridges, and the -80 freezer. In my doing so, I notice someone left a lit bunsen burner in a hood (opps). So I turn it off. Last thing we need is to have a fire.

After three and half hours, my fridges were at about 20 degrees C, don't know about the freezer, and my attempt to help the -80 got the temperature to -55.

At least I didn't have any experiments in the incubator. While the outside temperature will soon match incubator temperatures, we use conditions of 5% CO2, which will get depleted over the hours.

I have to go back over there this morning to see what's going on. I didn't see a lot of activity in terms of people working on the problem. But I did see a lot of extension cords and frantic moving of stuff.

Already some people are going to complain to someone that the building is vulnerable to allow it to be completely without power. Yeah, I'm pissed too, but I don't know what else they can do about it except move us all out of the building to the new BIO-5 (which I don't want to do).