As it happened, my assistant had called in sick and worst of all, our email system was down. All day. It just seemed to throw everything off, not having that one system available that we rely on so much these days (luckily, we still had Internet access, so I could amuse myself by checking Facebook and/or my personal email from time to time as needed). It starting working about 10 minutes before I left to come home and by then, it was too late, I was done for the day, mentally and physically. Even then, there were only a handful of messages to be read, probably because most of the email traffic I receive is from internal sources, who hadn't been able to write any messages all day. (Tomorrow might be a little busy as a result but I'm not going to worry about that now!)
It was such a disconcerting feeling all day to be working without current email. At least my messages were up to date to last Friday but my boss' system had reverted back to a day in early December, so she didn't have access to any recent messages. It could have been worse - our downtown office was completely without power and they had got sent home early in the day (sadly, we weren't). I did have work to do but it was more challenging, since you couldn't send a quick email to ask a question or clarify a point. I actually had to print out documents and hand deliver them to someone's office so they could review the changes I had made and we could discuss the content. If I needed to ask a question and someone was out of the office, I had to call them on their cell phone and hope they weren't trying to drive in this weather while talking to me!
As a result of this problem, I had to send a fax to someone today, a machine I think I have used maybe once in the past 6 months. But even that was a frustrating process. I sent one copy to Halifax with no problems but after an hour of trying to send a copy of the same document to someone locally, the second time I phoned the recipient's receptionist to confirm I had the right fax number, I was told "oh, but they were moving offices today so maybe their machine isn't hooked up yet". Hmm, could you not have told me that an hour and 3 attempts earlier??! Clearly, her brain was a little fogged up today as well.
As things are now outside my window. Heavily foggy, in fact. The temperatures are steadily rising, the freezing rain quickly became just regular rain and the new snow we'd received overnight has melted or turned into very wet slush. It's supposed to be 11 degrees Celsius tomorrow (remember this time last week when I was reporting it was minus 20 something?! How quickly things change!)
The other strange thing that happened today was that when I checked the Toronto Hydro website about the power outage downtown, I had also noticed that my apartment was reported to be within an outage zone. According to their website, the situation didn't change all afternoon so I was concerned about what I would find when I drove home. Which I did, very cautiously, happily noting that streetlights were working and neighbouring streets had power. When I got home, I found the power had never even been off! So much for Toronto Hydro's clearly misleading website, apparently they were experiencing technical difficulties today too!
All in all, I'm glad to be home, warm and dry and already in my pyjamas!
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