Infrastructure

For the second time in a little over a month, our office flooded. Well, not really our whole office. Let me explain.

It doesn't rain that much in Bangalore. It must've rained about 30-40 minutes today. But it rained pretty darn hard. Actually, it even hailed a little. We were standing inside and just joking about how much it would suck if it started to leak (since the roof leaked about a month ago) when someone was like "oh crap! let's go check the server room!"

So we rush over to the rooms where the various pieces of huge electrical equipment are and, sure enough, one of the balconies has overflowed and water has now gone into the main electrical room (where there are electrical wires running on the ground). Some people rushed to start bailing out the room with buckets but then came to their senses. We started bailing the balcony so that no more water would overflow into the electrical room. We couldn't just shut it off because all the servers would have an unclean shutdown. So the sysadmins started doing a server-room shutdown.

In the meantime, another of the balconies was starting to flood, and threatening to flood the office. In addition, the awnings in that balcony were sagging from the weight of water that had collected on them. So we alternated between pushing water off the awnings (to save it from collapsing from its weight) and bailing water out of the balcony (to prevent the office from flooding). Fun times.

It's stopped raining now but I'm guessing it will rain some more tonight. I decided to leave my car in the basement (although I don't really trust that building too much) and take a taxi home in case the roads were bad. A few fallen trees and fender-benders, but nothing major - at least on my route home. I can't imagine what some of the busier streets (Airport Road, Hosur Road) are like. The power is out at home - my building has generator backup (like many apartment complexes here) so I'm still blogging away.

Last time this happened, we had a holiday the next day (actually it ended up being a half day because the servers were brought back up). Wonder if I get to stay in tomorrow.