I encountered perhaps the weirdest issues I’ve had with electrical service in my life yesterday.
Yesterday morning I was woken up by the sound of the battery-backed power supply for the computer beeping, indicating that it was running off of battery power. But then it would stop beeping and return to normal. At first I thought that the power supply was failing so I turned off the computer and unplugged the power supply.
Since I was up I went to the bathroom and turned on the light, and noticed that the light was flickering. In fact, every light in the apartment that I tried was flickering. So what was apparently happening to the power supply was that the voltage being supplied to the house was fluctuating, and the power supply was having to rapidly cycle being suppling battery power and using the main apartment power.
The power eventually went out just before I left for work, and when I came back a couple of hours later, things had been restored.
So, OK, just some sort of weird hiccup in the grid, which the power company would repair and that would be that, right? Nope. :-) The same problem kept repeating throughout the day. My wife and I left to run errands and when we came back it looked like the power was out again. Luckily I checked the circuit breaker, because it turned out that another power fluctuation had caused it to trip, but power had already been restored. That was the only other time we lost power, but it continued to fluctuate throughout the day and night.
Today we haven’t had any problems with the power, luckily. I’m hoping the power company has figured out whatever the hiccup was.
I get to leave soon for my first patrol with my ship. I have to say that the engine room (and basically the entire boat) is much much bigger than the one I qualified on at Prototype. :-) On my first patrol I’ll have to qualify for a few watchstations, including the ever-important Engineering Officer of the Watch. Unfortunately those who are not qualified are pretty much expected not to take up too much rest time so I guess I won’t need to pack my computer or any movies.