By the Light of the Blackberry

Not much to tell you about today since we were so busy. We got up early to be ready for pickup at 7:00 AM. We were headed over to the office where the company currently has people working. The client was experiencing some issues with their desktops they wanted us to look at. When we arrived, there was no power to the building! After the jokes about “Hey well there’s your problem” we hung around waiting for the power to come back on. This took maybe a half hour, and helps demonstrate the kind of infrastructure issues that can cause a project like this to take a long time. I knocked out several items on the list but the day faded into evening and then the lights went out again. Then they came back on, but the breaker to our part of the building—wherever it is—needed to be flipped, so our lights stayed off. The server cabinet had power, but most of the other outlets didn’t. The only light came from our laptop monitors. By this time of course it was totally dark outside, and all the building maintenance people were gone. No one knew where the breaker box was. We could continue working but needed to move one appliance to a hot strip. Using light from mobile phones we traced the power cord back to the outlet and moved it. The appliance came on and we went back to work in the dark. About the time we finished the lights came back on.

I had the chance today to try the infamous Ghanian shito—a spice that tastes of chili powder. You have to put it on something like chicken or rice, but it was good!