I was walking back from the caffeteria with a friend this afternoon. We were were going up the stairs when all of a sudden the staircase became REALLY dark! We looked at each other and my friend said, "I am glad we didn't take the lift!". When we stepped out on to the corridor for our floor it was all looking very freaky. All the fire doors had closed and there was limited lighting. All the exit signs were glowing and that was about it. We saw a few confused faces on the corridors but nothing too alarming. By the time we got to our labs we were hearing faint beeping noises and all the labs were really dark. All the doors were unlocked and it all felt very strange and eerie.
There was havoc in the labs - everyone was peeping out of their offices and we had all gatheredaround in the tea room. People were discussing the documentry that was on last night about the London bomb blasts and how this reminded them of that... It was slightly amusing (and slightly worrying) to see some anxious faces...
Everyone was waiting for the lights to come back on. We have had powercuts before, but they they never lasted more than a few seconds - sometimes a few minutes. After about 5 minutes, everyone had their own story to tell. One of my colleagues has been working on a really MAJOR experiment, she had put her samples in the ultracentrifuge, and then she couldn't do anything about it. Another person was just about to press "go" on a machine when everything turned itself off - that was lucky! Someone else was working on a grant application - due in tomorrow and the computer turned off.
We were all starting to worry about our freezers. As we were discussing this, we were told that the powercut was actually hospital wide rather than being limited to our building. The generator apparently wasn't working and people were desperately trying to get it to work because we have sick children on operating theatres and accidents and emergency was out of power! Our problems were nowhere near as major as that. We were told to go home because we weren't going to get any power till much later in the evening anyway. So here I am!
I thought about the experiment I was doing. I thought to myself "I don't really need any electrical equipment to do some cell staining." All I need is a pipette, some slides and some reagents. However, it isn't all that easy working in the dark! I am sure it will be ok till tomorrow... I hope...
-
