Loma Prieta quake anniversary

[cjsmith]

Fifteen years ago today, I lived in Paris, France, where during the earthquake here I happened to be asleep there. I learned about it in the papers. That's how I learned the phrase for "smack in the middle of": "au beau milieu de". That's where someone's dishwasher wound up, out in the middle of the kitchen.

My previous employer was in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time, and he would have a better story to offer. He was collaborating on a software project with some folks in, I believe, Stanford (maybe Berkeley, but I think it was Stanford) and he happened to be on the phone with someone out here. The guy on the other end of the line yelled "OH SHIT!" and hung up on him. My exboss figured he'd continue working, and he noticed that the other guy's campus had dropped off the net. He waited a couple of minutes, attempted to call back, and couldn't. That's when he decided maybe "oh shit" was right.

Comments

[ckd]

I remember seeing a bunch of IRC users drop off-line all at once.

I managed to avoid an "oh shit" by not knowing that my dad was at a conference at the Presidio. As it turned out, he'd gotten out early and was at the airline counter trying to get on an earlier flight when the quake hit; lucky for me, the first I knew he was even in that area was my mom calling to say "he's okay" (to which my response was "okay? why would that be a surprise?").

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I've had phone calls like that. After my abdominal surgery a year and a half ago, as the grogginess of anaesthesia was wearing off, I figured maybe it'd be a good idea to call my folks. Their "Hi, how are you?" was met with "Recovering nicely," which surprised them. Then I realized I hadn't yet told them about the surgery.