Learning Things the Hard Way

Three years ago my wife and I lived in a neighboring town to Portland Oregon. Things are very different there than they are in the Los Angeles area, particularly the dependency on a steady flow of what we've all come to know affectionately as "electricity".

The power would blow out at least once every six weeks up there, and each time I swore that I'd purchase a battery backup unit. The next morning the power would always be back on and my server and workstation would always boot up just fine. I'd go directly to Amazon without passing Go (and without collecting my $200) and navigate directly to the battery backup units. Then I'd see how much they cost and I'd say to myself, "ok, you have a few weeks before this happens again, let's wait until you get the next check."

As I indicated, it's now three years later (long after we'd relocated back to Los Angeles) and last night when we were out to dinner at Frankie's the power went out or spiked or did something other than flow steadily. I arrived home to find that my active directory had become corrupt. Rather than fight with something I'm completely unfamiliar with I decided to use one of my PSS incidents and just get the problem solved. But this is the stuff of another blog entry to be made at a later date.

The point of the story is that after five power outages in the Portland area, where everything turned out fine, it took a corruption of my active directory and roughly 14 hours of labor (and my site being down) to make me order that battery backup unit.

Am I just thick as hell or do other people have stories like this?