My Internet goes out for about ten minutes every second Tuesday of the month because my building does “generator” testing. I don’t know what that entails but I do know that the elevators and all the equipment that my ISP keeps in the building loses power when the testing happens. I’m not sure why the electricity stays on for the units themselves. Why can’t the ISP equipment be on that same circuit?
Usually the testing is done at 10am or so and luckily, I have no meetings on Tuesdays at that time. For the entire time I’ve been work for home, this hasn’t been a problem, until today.
I had to interview a candidate over Zoom today and the interview was to start at 10am. I didn’t realize today was the second Tuesday of this month. I had working Internet until basically 9:59am, which was also the moment I decided to click on the Zoom meeting link. I couldn’t connect and I instantly knew what it was.
I frantically was trying to figure out how to get the Zoom meeting link onto my phone. I kinda panicked when I should have just typed in the meeting ID and password. It took me about five minutes before I finally clued into that.
Luckily, there was another engineer in the interview, so the candidate wasn’t alone the whole time. I apologized for being late, explained to them what happened, and did the interview using just my phone. It wasn’t ideal but I made it work.