I don't usually describe my showers because I generally don't write about my showers. When I went to dinner though, I fond out why exactly the last 10 minutes of my 30 minute shower (yes I like my hot showers) were ice cold and why they got so ice cold so quickly. Just as a precursor to the below email, the whole campus is based on steam, heated by it, cooled by it even. Well let me clear that up, the steam lines don't directly cool us, the plant produces cool water which cools us but anyway. So basically, you get endless supplies of hot water because you don't have to rely on a little hot water heater to do the job but can rely on the huge boilers in the plant. YOu enjoy this only until the plant has to be shut down and the steam that has heated your water for six years ceases to exist. Sadly, I live on the opposite end of campus to the heating plant so I guess I'm S.O.L. kind of like I was for almost two weeks in Gregson this summer. Remember that guys?

Facilities Management Utilities Operation and Maintenance steam plant has been shutdown because of a sudden failure of a critical component. Repairs are
expected to be completed within several hours, on the order of 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM this evening.

Following repairs, restoring full steam service to all facilities will take an additional 2 to 4 hours. Those facilities closer to the plant will experience
some steam service quickly, while facilities farthest from the plant will take longer. (I'm about as far away from the plant as is humanly possible on this campus. Well, not *that* far away but pretty damn close.

Being an engineer, I wonder what "crucial piece of equipment" broke. I wonder if the guy who was on when the crucial piece of equipment broke will be able to provide me with a job opening which has been recently vacated by him :P? Who knows, equipment breaks, things fail, but why not do things in parallel? Why shut the whole plant down? Its because its the university that's why :). I wonder if we'll actually get hot water tomorrow. Funny that both times the hot water dies, I'm in the middle of a shower, maybe I have ESP for knowing when hot water will cease to exist. Let's hope that the most difficult part of engineering actually goes as planned. 90% of problems created in plants happen at start up or shut down, so let's hope that the thing doesn't further die when firing it back up. More later.