I woke up this Monday morning around 4:15 when I heard a loud pop outside my office window, just a few seconds later a loud clap of thunder seemed to shake our entire home. Dazed by what had just happened I almost jumped out of my skin when the loud surge detection monitors that my entire office equipment was wired into started screaming. It didn’t take me but a second to realize that my electricity was completely out in my office so I decided to go checkout the rest of the house. When I got to the Kitchen I noticed that all of the appliances were off and the breaker outlets they were all plugged into had been tripped and blinking red, something I had never seen before.

It was about this point that I realized that our home had taken a direct hit from lightning so I ran outside and did a perimeter inspection at 5am in my pajamas to make sure nothing was burning anywhere. Fortunately I didn’t see any fires or gigantic holes in my roof so I headed back inside to check my breaker box. I noticed that several breakers had been thrown so I reset them and headed back into our kitchen only to find that the wall sockets that our appliances were plugged into had thrown themselves again for some reason so I went around and reset all of our electrical outlets and returned to my office to access the situation, and you guessed it, a vast majority of my equipment got nailed..

In the photo above you can see my development and testing environment that consists of three separate machines, a development machine (DEV-001), a testing environment (DEV-002), and a rules driven machine (DEV-003). Upon further inspection I determined that all three of these machines components were fried, from the mainboard all the way to the hard drive, sizzled, toast…

Frustrated and freaking out by all of the chaos that had fallen into my lap to kick start the week I decided to break for 15 minutes to take our puppy to the vet to have a routine neutering procedure taken care of. The idea was that we would pick him up later that afternoon and we could return home. Well, long story short, the vet called and informed us that our puppy needed not only to have the procedure that we came in with but he also needed immediate eye surgery to repair damage that we had noticed gradually worsening the past 2 days. In addition he also had an umbilical hernia that needed to be repaired as well. We authorized him to perform all of these procedures and then I focus on the process of getting my systems back online. After a few phone calls to my Insurance provider I was able to get my claim in the system and start on reconstructing my systems. As we went through and tested everything it didn’t take long to realize that most everything was going to have to be replaced so we took out pen and paper (because there is nothing in the house to type on) and started listing replacement components. Once I had everything listed that needed to be replaced I set out to pick up everything I could. Finally we returned home looking like we had robbed Egghead and got to work.

In addition to my office equipment we had several other pieces ruined from the surge, but I wasn’t crying about any of them near as bad as I have been my systems.

Five Things I Learned This Week:

1. If you have a home office, make sure your homeowners policy doesn’t have a cap on it to just pay a certain amount in the event your business equipment is lost or stolen.
2. When hurriedly running around to replace your damaged property, be sure to hang onto any receipts / paperwork that you get, the Insurance people will want you to fish those out of the garbage, scan them, or email copies to them. Ironically if you don’t have a system online to email or send a fax with, you need to develop a plan for accomplishing this quickly.
3. Backups of Everything! Fortunately I had my entire system backed up to a cloud storage solution that my partners and I offer through Pleth. I immediately logged into my account w/ my iPhone and realized that all of my data, and my clients data was safe and sound. I can’t imagine life had things been different.
4. Pugs can’t swim.
5. Pugs should wear helmets and flotation devices at all times.

Okay, shifting gears, we called the vet to see how Bogey did and they said he did great but that he would need to spend the night there and that we could pick him up the following morning. No problem, I got back to work and managed to get two systems somewhat functional.  And as for the dog, we picked him up yesterday afternoon, he had one leg shaved, stitches in his tummy and his privates, one of those lampshade things on his head, and one eye sewn shut so he couldn’t bother it while it heals. Taking in everything this poor puppy had been through the day before and seeing the pathetic look on his face I quickly realized that my problems could have been a lot worse, and at least I still have my reproductive organs intact…

I should also add that just 2 weekends ago I had to fish this same puppy out of a swimming pool that he accidentally backed off into by accident. It was 40 degrees! Life is an adventure to say the least!