Week 14

Another quiet week. Tuesday was a public holiday, so the office was quite empty on Monday.

On Thursday, we suffered a power outage. Fairly early on in the day, maybe 8:30 to 9am, everything went dark. Even the generator didn't seem to kick in. I was then given the background info, that this is not uncommon in the summer in Malta. Likely onset by the increase in fans and ACs running, the island cannot sustain its power usage. And while they are already being supplemented with power from Sicily, it seems even that is not enough. So sometimes there are outages that hit various parts of the island. In our case, the building block I'm in was hit, while the rest of MCAST seems to have been spared. A few people from my office ended up taking their work to the Administration building across campus, to finish off meetings there. I am not sure however, how much of the network would have been up, even there.

We stayed without lights for a while, then went through a few different variants. Lights one my phone is working -- my apologies to the caller I dropped when this phase ended; it was the first time anything was back on, and I thought we were good. Had I gotten any further calls, I would've taken down their number instantly. Lights on, nothing else. Lights off, outlets and subsequently PCs work. Lights off, only phone running. None of them lasted long. It wasn't until 10:30 at the issue was completely resolved.

In the mean time, the windows in the large office were opened with the curtains not drawn, to let in some light and a breeze. I realized at that point that I'd never checked out the view from work, and was surprised to see us close to water! It's not the open ocean, but it is connected to it. As I started to try and get a sense of direction, I got chatting with my colleagues. And after they pointed out a building or two (which I also recognized), they actually started to construct a very detailed picture of the landscape. Buildings I couldn't even see (despite having them pointed out) were named. Despite us not being high up, people were mostly in agreement about all of the different cities you could see. Most of this ended up being lost on me, as my geographical knowledge of Malta has been decent, but not enough, but I still thought it was fascinating to observe. If you go to the TV tower in Berlin, you may be able to point out certain landmarks and areas. But can you differentiate the different districts? The central cities on the east of Malta aren't towns separated by unpopulated areas -- they flow seamlessly into the next, with buildings connected to each other and truly no way to tell that you're suddenly in another place. And they can be so small. The places my coworkers recognized weren't even large landmarks to me, they were just places that you must recognize if you traverse the island by car a lot. 

We still had a handful of people come in while the power was out. Handing our certificates isn't a digital process, so we could still work. Overall though, it was a peaceful two hours in the office, before the rest of the day went on as usual.

I also still haven't been back to the gym, though I have taken some walks in the evening.