Oh. Em. Gee.

[destertale]

I have lots to update when I eventually get time. But today, I had to at least share this. Sometime between after I left work at 9 pm last night and before I got back in at 8:30 am this morning, a water pipe that ran down the center of the ceiling in our back work-room burst. I'm still having a hard time wrapping my mind around the amount of mess this created. So much stuff ruined. Because, librarians tend to have lots of papers and books and crafts and goodness knows what-all else on their desks, yanno? Not to mention the computers. The poor, poor computers. ;_; Since the water pretty much rained down from above (along with various chunks of disintegrated ceiling tiles) little was safe. Only the six cubicles along the wall were okay, the others are all arranged in the center. Under where the water ran. All day today was pretty much spent trying to do damage control. They wet-vacuumed the carpet as much as possible and treated it with something that is supposed to prevent mold and ran fans and dehumidifiers all day (probably will still be going tonight and/or tomorrow) trying to dry the carpet out. Sections of ceiling and wall are going to need to be scraped and repainted as well since the water bubbled and swelled under the paint in places warping it and even swelling it out like water balloons. It took them a while to get the lights working again, but eventually we at least could see better what we were trying to sort through. (I think the lights above my cubicle may still have water in them though.) Of course, we still opened to the public today. O_O Thankfully though, we had a bunch of subs come in (bless them with no notice like this) to help cover the desks out front and help patrons so that the regular staff could try to get things sorted in the back. Silver lining? I guess my desk is the most cleared off clean it has been since we moved the branch into this building 7 years ago. I have such a headache right now. lol

Pictures courtesy of Mdcapsfan: http://www.flickr.com/photos/capsgirl44/sets/72157614067121775/detail/

Admittedly? It could have been much worse. I'm glad it wasn't.