Earlier this afternoon I had a meeting in my office with one of my staff to go over a number of difficult issues.
We went back and forth over a number of topics. I, of course was up at my whiteboard drawing things on it and proving key points with insight and wit, or I suppose using the fact that I was the senior person in the office to dominate some of the conversation.
Suddenly my office, on the second floor of our four floor office building, started to move up and down and shift seemingly back and forth. I had no idea as to what was going on.
If I might digress for a bit, the human mind, or at least mine, tries to interpret completely unexpected events by relating them to something familiar. Many years ago at our previous house in a neighborhood that backed on a small park. I was reading and happened to look out the window. “Funny”, I thought, “when did my wife buy a deer statue to decorate our back yard with.” It seemed so large for something Ellen would get. Of course then the head of the deer statue leaned down and munched on a plant in our yard.
Back in my office, the only thought that occurred to me was that the floor felt like it would suddenly collapse, but then among the longest 20-25 seconds of my life stopped when the floor stopped shifting.
My staff person and I looked at each other, he said “What was that?”. We opened the door and looked in the hallway to see everyone else in the office milling around. Showing the executive decision making ability that I was hired to demonstrate as the COO at Powertek, I walked out the office door and down the one flight of stairs to the outside, moving away from anything that might fall on me.
After about fifteen minutes of milling about aimlessly, we all decided to go back in the building.
A friend of mine told me a story about when he was in San Francisco when one of the major earthquakes happened. He remembers putting his hands on the wall next to him and pushing as hard as he could to make sure the wall didn’t fall down. When the quake stopped he realized that this was one of the stupidest thoughts he ever had. When he walked outside, it was night, it was eerie since there were no lights anywhere in San Francisco.
During the time I was walking out and milling about, I checked in with my wife who was at home and confirmed that we had suffered an actual earthquake and my younger daughter who texted my wife that she had run down eleven flights of stairs and was safely protected by coffee at Starbucks.
By the time we went back in to the office and accessed the source of all current knowledge, Wikipedia, we were amazed (though we shouldn’t have been) that there already was a full story about the earthquake. Our CTO mentioned that he would have been more impressed if the entry had been made before the earthquake. It occurs to me that quantum computers could have that side benefit if designed correctly.
