Feel the mighty power (or don’t)
I just went over to Jeff’s office to drop off the garage door opener. As I jogged down the stairs, I saw an orange ladder and some maintenance people working on some sort of something which needed maintaining in his hallway. Taking no notice of them, I walked over to Jeff’s doorway which was occupied by one of his office mates saying something like “aren’t you supposed to stand in a doorway?”. I looked at him oddly and said “excuse me” and the gentleman said “oh, sorry” and let me by. Everyone else in the office had clearly very recently stood up and were discussing something of some interest.
“Did you feel that?” Jeff asked.
“No.”
“Yes you did.”
*stare*
“We just had an earthquake?” I asked incredulously.
Apparently so. The greater Los Angeles Area was just struck by what has tentatively been labeled a 5.3 earthquake [See also these pretty pictures]. It hit right when I was just taking notice of the maintenance people. The rumbling noise I heard I attributed to the something the mainenance people were poking at, and the shaking I didn’t feel at all as I jogged down the stairs.
Everyone thought this was oh so funny.
I was pissed. I’ve never felt an earthquake before, and here I was, right in thte middle of one, but I couldn’t be bothered to notice.
I swear the big one’s going to hit this weekend when I’m in .az.us, and Jeff will be surveying the rubble that will be Caltech laughing, “Oh, man, Mike is gonna be pissed.”
[…] tems on the book shelves in the lab shook very briefly, and the whole thing was over. Mike chronicled the details, as he was coming down the stairs leading to the lab as the quake struck. Go […]
Since you, Jeff, and Greg all have posts about the earthquake, I’ll just point you to my comment on Greg’s site.
Damn! I missed it too! You people get all the fun…
Mike, you’re not alone. I was also short-shrifted by the experience– it must have happened while walking around the restaurant, so any associated noise I would have attributed to things being moved around back in the kitchen, but in any case I don’t have any conscious memory of experiencing anything earthquake-like. Sigh…
When my brother first started working at Microsoft in Redmond, they had that recent earthquake near Seattle. At the time, he was fueling his car, and when he looked up at the roof above the pumps (supported by iron girders, no less) he saw it “swaying in the oddly strong wind”.
It wasn’t until he arrived at his office and noticed his co-workers scrambling around replacing manuals on their shelves that he realized what had happened.