"Goddammit!": an UPS Story.

It was a sunny day about a year and a half ago. I was sitting upstairs watching the television, talking with my father about something or other. A cat nudged my leg. Just then, as if on cue, the power cut off. Not but 2 seconds later, it came back on, as everything in the house whirred back up to speed.

"DAMMIT!", I yelled. This was the second time this had happened this week, and probably the fifth time in the month. "Let me go restart my computer."

As I waited for fsck to run, I thought to myself, "I really do need to get an UPS for this machine. This is getting to the point of absurd." All the daemons started up, I drudged back upstairs. Dad sat in his chair with a bemused look on his face.

"Maybe you need to get an UPS" (we pronounce it as "ups" instead of "u-p-s", just for kicks - hence the "an" instead of just an "a").

"Yeah, maybe."

"Well, let me stop by MicroCenter tonight and see what they've got there."

And so it was, two days later, I was installing a nice new Rayovac UPS under my desk. It wasn't anything special, but without my monitor, it should run my computer for 15 minutes. That would give me plenty of time to do a blind shutdown (you know, the kind where you switch out to tty3, which you know is open, then login, su to root and then do a 'shutdown -h now', all while not being able to see what's going on). This thing worked marvelously through all the "power hiccups", as my dad called them.

Then, when I moved down to Fairfax, disaster struck - the UPS would no longer operate. I had been careful with it in transport - apparently it just died, and at an inopportune time.

So we went back to MicroCenter and got it exchanged. Great.

I've been using that UPS with no problem for about 9 months now.

After waking up late this morning, I stumbled into my bedroom to get my pants. It seemed strangely quiet. I went into the bathroom, applied deodorant, got dressed, and went back into the bedroom. Then it hit me: my computers aren't on. That's pretty damn odd. But the monitors are. Hmmm. Let's see. The switch isn't on either. The computers are on the UPS. The switch is on the UPS. Then it hits me.

That piece of shit Rayovac UPS died!

"GODDAMMIT!"