Boring

Today I am at Boring Middle School.  Really.  Those of you locals know that it is a real school.  Those of you reading this from places far away might think I'm kidding.  It's real, and it's a great school.

Today is anything but boring.  It's The Declaration of Independence.  I think the kids think I am absolutely insane for being so enthusiastic about it...but I love it.  I have about 10 books about it...about the signers, the wives of the signers, the events leading up to the declaration, etc.

So of course I kicked of today as any true child of the 70s should--with Schoolhouse Rock.

But first period at school was actually the middle of my day.  I was at the dental office at 5AM this morning.  I saw on Facebook Friday that some other business owners on our street posted that their power had been off for about 6 hours.  I thought, "Wow!  It's lucky we aren't open on Fridays."  And I left it at that.

This morning a little voice in my head woke me up and said, "HELLO, JILL!  DON'T YOU KNOW THE SERVER'S UPS ONLY LASTS FOR 3 HOURS?" I realized that all of the office computers would be down.  I jumped out of bed and got in the car.  I just had to make sure that the server had shut itself down as it was supposed to when the power remaining was getting low.

Turns out the server had entered a self-destruct mode.  There was a BIOS screen up saying it could not boot, and the computer didn't even recognize that it had a hard drive to boot from.  The screen was saying it was August of 2004 and the server had no hard drives!  Heart attack!

I quickly kneeled down and prayed to know what to do.  This was way beyond me.  I instantly remembered a time a similar thing had happened a few years ago after replacing a battery on the motherboard.  I remembered how to enter setup and tell the computer it had a RAID 5 configuration.  When you do this, you see a warning and the words DATA LOSS WILL OCCUR and you have to say YES 5 times to verify that you want to do that.  So scary!

It reminded me of a hymn we sing that says, "Ere you left your room this morning, did you think to pray?"  Well, I had jumped out of bed and driven to the office, and I did not think to pray. I thought I was just going to turn things on, and I was in a hurry.  On my own I was in big trouble and didn't know what to do, but when I slowed down and asked for help, it was given.  Another line of the hymn says, "Prayer will change the night to day. So when life gets dark and dreary, don't forget to pray."

Night turned to day.  The server came up, no data was lost, and I got everyone else turned back on and running.  I had 10 minutes to drive home, put on clothes, brush my hair and get in the car for school.  I'm not as cute as I planned to be today, but the office is open for business, and that is all that matters.