TREE HUGGERS

What an ending to the week! I was on another one of my famous Oncall Week from Hell! Monday thru Thursday alone I had put in 13 hours of overtime! If only I got paid for that. Add to my Hell the decision to power down the computer room to update the power supply in there. One thing Servers and Computers don't like is being turned off. Given that news I knew I was going to have the most eventful weekends. So on Friday I go on and start designing a plan for the outtage when as soon as I started getting into it *BUZZZZZZZZZZ! The blaring sound of the fire alarm. Oh great I think another one of those damn fire drills! I walk down the hall and down the stairs, out the door and BAM the smell of gas was very strong! Everyone got out admist the screaming of the evacuators to stay away from the building and move to "X" area. Theres been digging and laying of new pipes going on in and around our building. And lucky for me, I live in a environmentalist city and not to make it any better I work for the state's environmental commission! Turns out that they had the construction company escavate and move a small shrub that was in the way of the digging. Yep a stupid bush cause the evacuation of a building and sent me home early for the day with a huge laundry list of unaccomplished tasks for the power down! So how much is the bush? Turns out they evacuated the building and sent everyone home with 3 hours to go til quiting time! Calculate how much a $100 shrub (and I'm being conservative on theprice) cost by sending about 400 people home for almost half a day and paying them for the time. Yep that measly $100 tree ended up costing the citizens of the Great State of Texas thousands of dollars, the leak of the gas out to the environment and poluting it, and paying the landscaping company for the move just to please those wonderful tree huggers. One can only laugh at the irony! I know I did!

-ALBERT
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Date: Friday - June 10, 2005 3:28 PM
Subject: Evacuation of Building A

Staff have been evacuated from Bldg. A. due to a gas leak outside of the building caused by a landscape company excavating a tree for relocation. Building A employees have been instructed to leave the campus. The Fire Department is on the scene and handling employee safety.