Thunderstorms rolled through the Upper Valley last night. Around eleven I stood on the porch in the light rain and watched the show exit stage right, East. The lightning disperse and dimming. The thunder a retreating grumble. Show is over, time for bed, windows cranked open to let in the fresh breeze. There were a few flashes of lightning in the distance, but the storm was wrapping up.

Wa-Bam!

A half hour later we were ripped from slumber by a flash of light and explosion of sound. The dog jumped, the cats jumped, we jumped. It was the high school prankster again, the one who'd sneak up and slam a large book just to laugh at your surprise. The shot of espresso consumed three hours earlier kicked back into action. Zeke started panting. Everyone was tossing. A deep, inner brain reptilian function urging that we take flight. Nonsense. A fluke. All is quiet on the slumber front. Look, it's not even raining. Five minutes later the next bolt hit within a hundred feet of the house. For a brief moment it was harsh daylight inside. A thought flashed that the lightning had somehow turned on the house lights. There wasn't any delay in the wall of sound that slammed us. You could hear the progressive snap, crackle of the bolt slicing earthward and eruption of air expanding in it's wake. Slow motion sound. And that was that. We're all tensed for the next strike which never came. Not even a series of retreating, lesser bolts. These two had been an afterthought. Whoops. Forgot that you had these other two packages. Have a nice night. Sleep tight. Which reminds me of another cranky late night storm back in 1996. Jeff and I had been fervently working on our company's geographically searchable yellow pages application. At stake was the other half of VC funding and our reputation with this other small startup...Yahoo. Yahoo was our first customer for the yellow pages and part of the VC delivery deal. To date our delivery schedules had been spot on, although Jeff always insisted on an "Acts of God" clause. When I left work that afternoon Jeff was wrapping things up for the next day's delivery. He'd finished writing the spatial code and was doing the final database tuning and tweaking before shipping it out to the main office in California. I got into work around six the next morning and damned if Jeff didn't have some kind of wild party without inviting me. Office furniture was strewn about, a little food refuse here and there, and worst of all everything was covered in dirt. It looked like someone had been playing peek-a-boo with the ceiling tiles and then failed to clean up all of crap that ceiling tiles shed whenever disrupted. My computer had been messed with and, crap, is that a hole in the wall? That's when I found the semi-incoherent note from Jeff. Something along the lines of "I had an exciting night" (well, yeah!) proceeding to explain something about a storm and a lightning bolt. I was getting really mad at Jeff. I couldn't understand what a lightning storm had to do with any of this and how it could justify the mess he left behind. I started noticing the brown etchings of arc marks on the suspended ceiling grid. A softball sized burn mark under an air vent. That head sized hole in my wall was actually blown outwards, just below another sizeable scorch patch. The disheveled furniture must have been Jeff's attempt at unplugging everything. You could see why: blackened modem jacks, melted 10baseT connectors, and everywhere the telltale trails left behind by arcing electricity. Jeff came in later that day, still shaken, and took photographs. Mostly so he could send the "Act of God" proof out to the west coast office. Probably also so he could figure out what hit him. Seems he was getting ready to shut things down around 2am when lightning hit about six feet away, outside his office. "It was like what I imagined being inside a nuclear blast would be..." was one of his descriptions. An all encompassing whiteness and deafening roar of sound. He didn't know what it was at first. Afterwards he couldn't really see, not only because all of the power went out but because he'd been temporarily blinded. Dust, smoke, and ringing ears. He thought there might be a fire and made his way out of the building, blindly groping down the stairway. Then he remembered the database and made his way back inside trying to collect equipment. Finally he realized that he didn't know what he was doing and went home. After the dust had settled I put together a little picture story from his photos: Jeff and the Lightning Bolt. Of all the fried computers, phones, modems, network equipment, and fax machines Jeff's computer was the lone survivor. The database and applications had survived. We even made our scheduled delivery date and powered the Yahoo yellow pages, among others, for the next two years.

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