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story time (long)

Just had the biggest scare of my life.

Some context is necessary. Katy works an evening shift, so we usually sleep in to 10-11AM. She also likes to sleep in absolute darkness, not a single photon in the room. To this end, we've taken drastic measures to ensure that we can have the bedroom very dark, even at noon.

This morning (and I use the term loosely) I woke up to notice that the outlet my phone charger and the nightstand lamp are plugged into was emitting a distinct orange glow. Nothing plugged into it is causing this; it's coming from the outlet itself.

I woke Katy up with an urgent sounding "ummmm". I thought we had a small electrical fire inside the outlet. I ran to the breaker box in the kitchen to throw the breaker for the outlet and grab a screwdriver so I can get into (and hopefully extinguish) the outlet.

Turned off the power and was reaching for the drawer with my screwdriver and Katy says "I think I know what it is."

Turns out, this outlet shares an electrical box with an outlet on the other side of the wall and the sun was shining on it. In the total darkness of the bedroom, the glow I was seeing was sunlight from the other side.

Anyhow, that's how the server abruptly lost power today.

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