Enter: Disaster

This is a variation of Dan's tabblo, using Antonio's and Dan's photos, as well as my own.

It was around 6pm, and I was absorbed in some problem having to do with a feature Dave was cooking up, and with my own preparations to go home.

I'm generally kind of absorbed in the work I'm doing, so it took me a little bit of time to register that the background noise had changed from the normal distant conversations, to some more stressed tones of voice and a loud WHOOSHing sound I did not recognize.

I stood up, and looked out the door to the engineer's office suite, and this is what I saw.

My first thought was to pull my stuff together as quickly as I could, unplugging power from my laptop, packing things up, and getting stuff off the ground.  There was a LOT of water coming my way.

I opened a window, as the smell from the dirty water was truly obnoxious, and Dan was saying we had better get downstairs.  He thought the Fire Marshall would be irritated if we remained upstairs in this situation -- he also thought the other sprinklers were bound to go.

Not having any clear path to the elevator, which probably wasn't working anyway, we headed down the back stairs to make sure help was on the way.

We thought the firemen were heading up the correct stairwell -- we were mistaken.  It took them several minutes to make it to our mezzanine office.

Dan, Dave and I headed back up the back stairwell, where Dave helped get John's wife and kids downstairs.  I noticed that my Teva's were not going to cut it for the work ahead, and so I went to my car and changed into slightly more durable shoes and put my computer away.  I headed back into the adventure.

I was greeted with...

Saving what can be saved

It takes a lot of work to save a bunch of printers, tables, frames, shipping materials, computers, file servers, boxes, dongles and miscellaneous bits from water damage.  However, I think we have a pretty sharp team, and we got some good ideas of how to make really quick progress in short order.  By creating 'bucket brigades' (a good term, from Dan's variation) or perhaps better, sweeper brigades, we managed to move quite a lot of water in an impressively short amount of time. 

By now, it's about 9pm.

Aftermath

Within the span of about 4 hours, our office went from normal, to quite a wreck, and back to dry and safe again.  There is more work to be done, but it's pretty much touch-up work, and restocking our supplies for sending out prints.  It's a good thing so many people were still in the office, as every person played a really important role in getting things back to normal-ish quickly.  I was really worried that our subversion repository was at risk, but luckily, and kind of amazingly, it was safe and sound.

Believe it or not, it looks like we're back to business as usual tomorrow in the office!  We had such good features we wanted to give to you tomorrow -- we might hold those off a day or two to make sure we're able to give them full attention before release.

Thanks to all who have written in -- it really puts things in a nice perspective.