Fifty-Second

Argh! All hands on deck at work just now, I'm afraid. One of the sites I look after had a scheduled powerdown over the weekend, which isn't usually a problem, but there were problem getting the power back up on yesterday morning, meaning that I was in the office for 7.30 to power up the servers, telephones and network kit, only to have to wait around until 10.30 for the power to be restored.

Unfortunately, when the power did come back up, it must have surged and ended up blowing the power on around 70-odd workstations across the building. Of course, we don't hold any replacement PSUs in stock, so I had to run around the office, stripping out PSUs from unused workstations, to try and get as many up and running as I could. Typically, I was the only engineer in yesterday. Anyone who's ever had to do any work on corporate desktop PCs will know how tightly packed the cabling and components are - I had to strip and replace nearly 40 machines on my own yesterday, meaning my fingers were raw, bloody and swollen by the time 6.30 rolled around, and I stumbled onto the train home.
My left index finger is still really sore, and actually feels like it's infected - which wouldn't surprise me given the dust and dirt you find in these average user's pc that's never been moved, dusted, wiped or cleaned in the 3 years they've had it, despite being subjected to crumbs and splashes from multiple sources, multiple times.

Still, my colleague is back in today, meaning I don't have to deal with it alone, unfortunately we won't get any replacement PSUs sent out until tomorrow, maybe, and even then we don't know what time exactly. Thank God we've got a room of our own away from the users, I've a feeling we'd have been lynched by now, were we out amongst the populace. The room itself is small comfort, I can hear the users just outside, pawng softly on the faux-wood panelling, moaning gently in despair. It's like my own private World War Z.