Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Bad luck is gone



I have often questioned the validity of the black cloud concept that some people often speak of, personally I do subscribe to the concept of karma though. It does make sense that we receive in return what energy we put forth into a universe comprised of positive and negative energy, good or bad between karma and plain old bad luck I will take the karma any day.

If the black cloud concept is a valid bad luck then yesterday proved my cloudy days are long gone and my good karma has kicked into high gear.

We had a really bad chain of thunderstorms move in 30 hours ago and I am not speaking of the normal hotter weather rains that befall us all, I mean the gully washers and light show variety. Towards the end of the hour-long bad storm, the thunder was beginning to calm down from the constant barrage to only a few booms a minute when all the lights went out in the apartment. One moment I am going through great news items from Wild Bill and the next moment it is dead silence.

Six and one half hours later the local electric company had been in our complex on our street for over an hour and I knew by the sight of multiple cherry pickers in the air on electric poles that we had a problem. We telephoned the electric company to see if they had an approximation on when it may be back on and we learned it had hit multiple transformers, a few lines down and we were in it for the long haul.

Segue to much later, the heat in the apartment was building to jungle levels, the air becoming sticker by the moment and my aged eyes had become accustomed to seeing in the dark all the power, lights, televisions and video games came on at once to a cacophony of noise and a round of clapping and hollering from everyone still outside on patios.

We have many electronic items in my apartment, yes, we are spoiled and honestly, we have earned them, but we immediately experienced problems. The bedroom cable boxes and DVR combinations booted without incident loaded the cable channels and life returned to normal. The living room cable box was dead as a two-day-old fish. I telephoned the local company and a technician and I began troubleshooting. He immediately informed me he could not access that one specific unit, not even with the code I had given him from the back of the unit. A few more tests and he informed me it had taken an electric spike as he did receive one code from the other boxes telling him that exact statement.

That over and an appointment set to repair I immediately go the computers. Allow me to preface by I had protected my computer investment with a UPS, (Uninterruptable Power Supply) which provided guaranteed lightning protection as well as battery back up allowing a fifteen minute window to power down during a power outage.

The UPS had taken a hit as it had a blown fuse, apparently, when the transformer was hit, the power surge went through the living room apartment circuit blowing out the Cable/DVR, but stopped at the UPS, the fuse taking the brunt of the spike.

So now, I can safely say that I feel the good karma has returned to my life and I will not have to go see that medicine man to get my luck back. Now I will be spending my day in an attempt to catch up with the news, great stories from Wild Bill and the blogs. Stay tuned and stop back later for the updates.

Until then, I recommend a good name brand UPS unit to anyone who has an investment in a computer, like it or not, they are needed and they work.

Ranter Note: Noticed the graphic headers on the others posts are gone. This site is a beta test for blogger and it like something went wrong. I will take care of that later and notify their staff.

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