Sometimes you just have a day where — at the end of the day — you still can’t believe it happened. It still feels a bit unreal.

One of the things that I am in charge of is the Learning Commons, which happens to be on the lower level. And over the weekend, it flooded with about 2 1/2 inches of water. The entire room, the long hallway outside of it, everything. Of course it happened on a Saturday – so I found out about it 48 hours after the fact, when most things (not all things, as I was to find out) were dry. And musty.

We still aren’t quite sure what happened – but the rumor is that the sprinkler system malfunctioned upstairs, sending a wall of water cascading down the elevator shaft. With nowhere else to go, it went down into the lower level. (In fact, it wasn’t the first time that room flooded. Years ago when it housed the journals and microfilm, we dealt with 10″ of water in there when a main pipe line burst. But that was before my time.)

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It was an interesting morning. I walked past the data room at work and heard a rather loud noise.

Turned out to be the server. We entered the room and it was HOT. The air conditioning had turned off overnight it seems. Didn’t see any issues after it was turned back on (by the IT department) at least. But still…poor server.

We’re in the beginning stages of another summer thunderstorm. There have been many lately thanks to the hot temperatures. Today’s high was 90f (32c), feeling like 97f (36c). The latest thunderstorm just began in the last minute or two, though it has been windy for the last hour or so. They told us to expect winds up to 60mph (96km/h).

That reminds me of a storm that we had a few days ago – we had emergency alerts taking over our TVs for most of the day (including 3 in 5 minutes! It was insane), though nothing ended up happening in my neighborhood. In America, the National Weather Service can decide to send out an alert, which takes over the programming and changes the screen to black with information and some loud beeps to get your attention. They then tell you about the situation, including where it is and what to expect. At least we don’t get too many tornadoes in New York!

Speaking of alerts, the security department at work told us to expect some alerts through our “beacon system” this afternoon. I wish they had mentioned that that would mean that their alert system would be taking over the public computers without warning:

Just imagine the red ALERT! flashing every second or so for maximum scary effect.

Of course I found it amusing that this alert only appeared on the public computers, not the staff computers. Maybe they don’t want to warn us about our impending doom…

One of the more random things that I have seen since moving here is a few rare occurrences of dollar bills tracked through Where’s George?, a website which allows you to track where your dollar bills (and other American currency) have been.

So far I have found 6 registered dollar bills. None of them have had any further hits after I registered that I found the bill.

Serial number removed for George’s protection 🙂 Around the seal, it reads “Track this bill wheresgeorge.com”. The two arrows point to the serial number (top) and series number (bottom). On the right side it says “This is registered bill”. There are different stamps out there. This one is pretty elaborate.

In case you are wondering, the top user has entered over 2 million bills and had hits on 371,000 of them. (He actually stamps new bills and sends them on their way, which obviously raises the counts a lot. Most people just find already stamped bills and mark that they were found again.)

Here’s a snippet from his website mentioned above:

“I am catching a lot of the local people looking at me out of the corner of their eyes and several of the local elderly have been giving me the Anti-Evil-Eye sign behind my back.

Lately, the bank in Wattsburg always seems to be closed when I pull up in my car (even at noon) and Bill Spenser at the Keystone station is getting tired of selling me gasoline 6 or 8 Georges at a time.”

Since it is technically illegal to deface American currency, the Where’s George website does have its own rules section to try and prevent liability on their end. You can also read more at the Wikipedia page,  which states that bills which are entered into the system but not marked are called “stealths” and that most people mark the bills to increase the hit rate. So the consensus on the Where’s George? website’s end is that people are only marking the bills to get more hits – they themselves do not encourage it.

It’s odd that I didn’t see many of these marked bills in Chicago, only when I moved here. It’s an interesting tactic, and apparently Canadians have a similar site called Where’s Willy?