Under the Wire: A cure for boredom

OPINION: It’s amazing how incredibly boring some technology can seem, right up until the moment it becomes essential.

We “pundits” take great pleasure in writing about the future of digital music downloads and video iPods and LCD monitors and super-snazzy gadgets of every which sort, while with equal eagerness we avoid wherever possible writing about backup strategies, firewall software and -- that most boring of boring boxes -- uninterruptible power supplies (UPSes).

I mention this now because about, maybe, 18 months ago, I agreed to review an uninterruptible power supply -- for the record, an MGE Pulsar Ellipse Premium uninterruptible power supply. That’s a very suave name for what is (I’ll be honest with you) a dull beige box with plugs on the back and a blinking light on the front (the Pulsar, perhaps?).

I wrote the review with all the usual stuff -- specs, ratings, ease of setup, blah blah. I simulated a power failure in my home office by throwing a circuit breaker in the fuse box. The UPS performed as promised, so I gave it an OK review. Hard to get enthusiastic, you know.

A few months later, I moved to a new house, taking my home office with me. In truth, I actually moved to a much older house with, it turns out, older, nastier wiring.

A couple of days before writing this, I had what I will call ‘a Star Trek moment’. You know those bits in the old Star Trek series where the Enterprise would pass through a mysterious alien cloud or get hit by a Romulan disruptor beam and before Scotty has time to reconfigure the deflector array to emit a tachyon beam or whatever gobbledygook, the ship shakes uncontrollably, crew members fall all over the place and (here’s the really relevant bit) control panels emit showers of sparks?

That’s what happened to me. My wife switched on the light in the other room. There was a buzzing noise, which we’ve heard before. This time, though, the noise got louder, and seemed to be accompanied by a sound like some kind of creature trying to dig its way into the house through the light fitting.

I got up from my desk to investigate and, just then, there was a bang and a shudder, the house went dark, and a shower of sparks issued forth from where the light fitting used to be (no-one hurt, thanks for asking). For a moment I felt like asking Mr Sulu for a damage report, but suspected my wife might not see the humour. She’d had a bit of a surprise and seemed to be speaking Klingon.

The power surge that had been initiated by a faulty baffle in the bathroom light fitting left a burn mark on the ceiling, blew fuses, and managed to snuff out every light bulb in the living room, dining room and kitchen. I also may be in the market for a new TV, though I doubt I’ll bother replacing the VCR that met its end that day.

Here’s the cool bit. When I returned to my office, maybe half an hour after the incident, my computer was still sitting there happily, as if nothing had happened at all. None of my external hard drives (I have nearly a terabyte distributed amongst five disks) missed a beat or lost any data.

This was the sort of incident that can be catastrophic to a home office, and the sum total of difference it made was a message on screen telling me the power seemed to have gone out and I probably ought to save my work and shut things down soon.

I’d completely forgotten that the UPS was still there. Suddenly I was not only acutely aware of its presence, but also its biggest fan.

Forget video iPods -- UPSes are cool.

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