It’s hard to just laugh sometimes, but it really is funny. What I’m talking about is the never ending tail chasing that is my life here.

On the bright side the rains have finally come, and hopefully mean we will have electricity for more than 8 hours a day soon. With those rains came lightening and with that lightening came my ever so familiar “tail chase dance”.

The storms so far have not been very significant but on night one a lightening strike that sounded to be easily 8 or so kilometers away managed to turn a AC/DC 220/12 volt power supply into a 16 volt power supply. That wound up being more then an important network component would tolerate and left me spending many hours, first identifying the problem, and then remedying. 12 volt devices are really nice when we use 12 volt batteries to power our UPSes.

Then there was storm #2. I didn’t see the flash of this lightening bolt, but it sounded like it may have been a bit closer. Our one year old, Indian made, and very expensive server UPS decided to give up! Of course not quickly and obviously. In fact after complaining very clearly of an “overload/short circuit” a disconnection from AC power (yes, we just so happened to have power at the time which adds to the irony) and reconnection resulted in no change, but disconnecting and reconnecting the battery put us back in business for about 2 hours until it croaked again and this time for good. Friday night, down the toilet.

So working around all that the night before most shops are closed for Hindu holy day was really a fiasco. After trying everything to revive the UPS whose only response to power of any kind is to light all of the LEDs on the front, I tried a smaller one we had whose battery we had assumed was dead… we were wrong. That UPS was also no good, and of course the same brand. UPS number 3 managed to work long enough to let me get home and go to sleep, but with 8 hours of charging and a VERY large battery, it could only manage to stay on for a few hours running only one wireless access point. That’s not much use at all now is it? Especially now that power has returned but the UPS hasn’t!

So I suppose of all of the very lofty virtues God could want to use, from all of the spiritual gifts we like to compare like trading cards in our Christian circles. So far… it seems… God has used my stubbornness as much as any. How did that get left out of the list? (“long-suffering”???)

Next time a local electrician convinces everyone else that the ground (earth) slot in an outlet is just to hold the plug better, or that burying wires is a waste of time, stretching them from one building to another and using trees as power poles is really the professional way to do it, I’ll again adamantly insist that it is unacceptable! My suggestion may even get written off as just being stubborn. To that I’ll say, amen!

For now I have to laugh… it’s like a Dilbert cartoon… I may be Dilbert, which really stinks sometimes, but it is really funny too. Next time around I may catch that fuzzy thing that is moving around just in my peripheral. Really, I may just!