The power finally came back almost twelve hours to the minute after ’s outage. Four-fifteen in the morning and every clock started beeping and the radio started blaring, I think I’d only been asleep for a little over an hour in the 30 °C night.
There was a diesel generator thumping away all night at the end of the street powering some important part of the railway at Oakleigh station. A couple of minutes after the power came on and we’d reset the alarm clock and tried to go back to sleep, the fire brigade all came charging down the street with lights ablaze and sirens on! I think someone may have forgotten to unplug the generator when the mains came back on.
New office, new desk, same old crap, same old person
Needless to say, Wednesday the 17th is a very slow, quiet day as I try to make it through the working hours in my new stuffy, airless office.
Revisited:
We bumped into a contractor on Saturday morning, locking up the gates onto the railway tracks as he was clearing up. Seems that the mysterious brick windowless building at the end of the Oakleigh station platform contains a compressor and some 1960s era electrical equipment which is all part of the rail-signalling system. The power outage on Tuesday damaged it and they had to run a spare compressor all night to keep the points working — not a generator as I’d thought. When the power came back it ran for almost a day, but then it blew up and caused a blackout. Of course there are no parts available for a roomful of 1968 electrical equipment, but he’d repaired it and it should keep running until the next time it breaks down!
