Shaking

I have a middle-of-the-day doctor's appointment coming up. I work towards downtown, my doctor works in Kanata, and I live in the middle, so I decided I should get set up to work from home so that I don't spend an hour driving each way.

Tuesday, I applied for access to work from home. (Since I am a contractor, I didn't think I got access automatically.)

Yesterday morning I found out that I did have access already, and I started installing the VPN software. It needed a restart, though, so I decided that I would let it install at the end of the day and take my laptop home on the weekend to try it out.

By now I'm sure that everyone has heard that Ottawa got hit with a minor earthquake yesterday afternoon.

It's not the first one - I remember feeling at least two others in the last 10 years, and I know there were more that I just didn't notice.

Yesterday's, though, was the first one that happened while I was at work. It's also the first one that happened while I was around other people, actually.

I was at my desk on the 9th floor of the building with two coworkers when it started shaking.

It turns out that an earthquake is almost as good as a power outage in making everyone stop what they're doing.

After it ended, everyone milled around and then we got the word to evacuate. By this time, it looked like it was pretty much over.

I work in a group of three towers, but they're pretty much the only tall buildings in that immediate area, so being outside wasn't the worst idea - and pretty much everyone in my department decided to work from home the rest of the day, so we all grabbed our laptops and headed outside.. I hadn't driven to work, so I got a ride with my neighbour.

When I got home, I saved everything I was doing and rebooted my computer. It finished installing the software, and I connected.

It's not the way I planned to test working from home, but it worked.