Government Wisdom
It's all tightly regulated. Take, for instance, emergency power generation. I happen to work in a building with a 1 MegaWatt backup diesel power generator. This is a useful thing to have, as lots of stuff in said building doesn't like being shutdown, especially ungracefully. When I say lots of stuff, I mean, quite literally, billions of dollars worth of equipment. So it is fair to say the regulation stipulating emergency power is a wise one. Of course, we can't have a backup generator just sit there. It has to be tested to make sure it still works. This testing occurs exactly once every month, as dictated by regulation. Again, a wise decision. We wouldn't want to suddenly need the generator (which, by the way, is equipped to automatically engage in the event of a commercial power loss) and have it not work.
But I have saved the best wisdom for last. In their infinite wisdom, someone has decided that it is not merely sufficient to turn on the generator once a month to verify its operational status. Yea, verily, it must also be activated, and a very large single-pole single-throw (the same kind in Dr. Frankenstien's lab) switch must be thrown, to shift the entire energy load of the building onto the generator for a period of several hours.
Now, what do you think happens when a very large switch is thrown to shift from one power source to another? Correct! There is a correspondingly very large power glitch in the *entire* building. UPS's engage, beeping their astonishment at the audacity of the electrical current, but faithfully provide interim power to thier subjects. Unfortunately, not everything in the building has a UPS backup, especially those pieces of equipment with very large power requirements. Incidentally, these are the very same pieces of equipment which get very cranky when their power supply is interrupted. And by cranky I mean things break. Expensive things. So, given this apparently immutable regulation, how do we adapt to this situation once a month? Well, I'll tell you. Once a month we shutdown the expensive equipment that doesn't like to be shutdown because shutting it down our way is better than having large amounts of volts surge through it when a switch is thrown, twice in one day.
So, let's recap: to protect expensive, sensitive equipment we have a regulated emergency power generator that, by regulation, is tested once a month, and, also by regulation, is switched over to power the sensitive, expensive equipment, thus often damaging said equipment by the very regulations designed to protect it.
That, my friends, is government wisdom. Some say the finest there is. I am not one of them.
posted by TinfoilHat @ 12:01 PM
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