I just got home after pulling 16 hours of overtime at my job. This was after putting in a full eight hour day.

You might be wondering why I worked 16 hours straight.

Around 7:00PM last night I got a call from my boss. He was looking for someone to babysit one of our central offices that was running on a generator. A tree had fallen right outside the building and knocked out the power, among other things. Because overtime is very rare at my job I jumped at the chance and drove for an hour to get to the office.

When I got there it looked rather grim. My boss had not been completely honest with me on the phone and once I arrived I found out that not only was the power out but the tree that knocked out the power also burst a transformer and burned up a 1200 pair copper cable and a major piece of fiber optic cabling.

The ground below the tree had the "struck by lighting" look. A large area of dirt had been turned to greenish glass from the extreme heat of the fire. The fiber optic cable had been burned clean through and would need to be replaced. What I thought would be a couple of hours of babysitting turned into a very long night.

Lucky for me the foreman in charge of the line gang brought 12 pizzas and several two-liter bottles of soda. Later on in the night a local resident brought us donuts.

By about 1:00 AM the power company had repaired there cables and we were off the generator. By 5:00 AM the important fibers had been spliced with a new fiber drop. By 6:00 AM I had my important equipment that ran on the fibers 100% functional again.

They were still splicing away on the copper pairs when I left at 9:30 AM.

One of the benefits of my job is that any overtime over 11 hours in a week gets counted as double-time. So, for working those 16 hours I got paid as if I worked about 27 hours. Of course now I'm dead tired and sucking down coffee just to stay awake!