The power in my dorm blinked this morning.
"Ha!", I thought to myself, as my roommate's computer rebooted, and all the clocks started flashing 12:00. "Glad I've got that UPS box!"
Little did I know, I was soon to learn the terrible price of hubris. The power shortage must have taken out a router momentarily, because Mozilla complained of reset connections, and then promptly crashed.
Irked by Mozilla, I took the risk of firing up Netscape instead. For those of you who don't run Linux, Netscape on Linux is even more of a slow, resource hogging, buggy beast than it is on Windows. About half an hour later, Netscape decided to freeze up, and take X Windows with it. Since my roommate was asleep, and I didn't want to borrow his computer without asking, and I didn't feel like walking across campus to a public computer lab to SSH in and kill -9 X, I just hard rebooted. Unfortunately, when my system came back up, I had the unpleasant surprise of watching dhcpcd fail to obtain an IP address for me. The DHCP server must have been taken out by the power blink. (This has happened before).
It took them 7 hours to fix this.
That's 7 hours without Everything. 7 hours without Slashdot. 7 hours without email! Shudder.
Thank goodness for A-Team reruns, and occasional breaks to go to class, or I'd have gone insane.
Update: I've since discovered that, unlike the dorms, the campus comuting center was without power for most of those seven hours, so I guess I can forgive their failing to correct the situation ;)