Dealing with Disruptions from Single Digit Temps

19 high. 8 low. Whoa. Texas gets below freezing temps, but rarely single digit temps. Cold, yes. Affect work, just a little because the kids didn’t have school. It turns out to be a booming YES.

This week has not gone the way I expected. I knew extremely cold temps were heading toward the Dallas-Fort Worth area, but I never thought my kids would be out of school for two or three days and that we’d have rolling blackouts. Four of them came my way in six hours … so far. (Another place just one mile down the road had zero by the time I had three. Hmm …)
I’m grateful for rolling blackouts with their lasting 15 to 20 minutes max. The alternative is to go without power for hours, freeze in my house and worry about refrigerated food. A friend of my daughter’s went without power for over five hours. Yikes. Yay, rolling blackouts.
My computer connects to an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) so that sudden outages don’t hurt the computer. But I need to shut it down as soon as I can to preserve the UPS.
Since I use a wireless network, the network goes down as soon as the blackout hits. This means I can’t save any work done over the Internet. Easy workaround. The content stays on the screen after the wireless shuts down. So I just copy the content and paste it into a document that I save on my computer. Then, I safely turn it off.
The constant shutting down, booting up breaks the work flow. After the fourth blackout, I clock out the computer knowing a laptop stands by I need anything.
I started writing just before the second blackout occurred. When the power returned, I moved on to admin work doing first of the month stuff. It needs to be done and this is a good time to do it as disruptions don’t get in the way of the process.
Constant interruptions during writing produces a scattered draft that’s worse than an expected bad first draft. And when you try to get back in swing of things, the power goes out again. Nasty cycle that. Just not a good use of time.
Cell phones. Amen for them! I email my clients to let them know I’d be out of the loop. Thank you, wonderful and understanding clients.
Snow is A-OK in my book. Ice… not so much. Few of us own ice skates and sleds around these parts. Although, I did have a sled in my childhood home and my parents had a perfect small sloped driveway for sledding. AND my neighbors had an unusual driveway that went below the street (only house to do that), so I’d sled down our drive way gaining enough momentum to make it down the neighbor’s driveway.
My current driveway has a slope, but it’s not safe because it’s in the back facing an alley with fences blocking the view both ways. You can’t see who’s coming unlike the driveway in front of my parent’s house. Besides, there’s very little street space (just enough for a car and one person walking next to it), so the chances of smashing into the neighbor’s fence are very good.
What unexpected work disruptions have encountered and how did you deal with them?
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