Daily post for Friday – Disaster narrowly averted!
Posted on September 17, 2010
Filed under Daily Writing
It’s late so this daily post will be pretty short.
Friday night turned into guy’s night here at the ranch. My wife was out of town and my daughter went out with a friend for dinner and a movie. (Her first try of Thai, I later found out.) I had to do a delivery to a client and then my son and I went for some budget TexMex fare.
Upon returning home, we both went into the basement and I started hunting for a movie to watch. I was originally looking for an ancient VHS tape of the HBO movie Fatherland, with Rutger Hauer, feeling the need for some alternative history. (The book was much better, by the way, but the movie wasn’t bad.)
We have quite a collection of DVD’s and tapes here, and I was looking through a set of them that happened to be on some of those shelves you attach to the wall with the metal strips and the brackets you can move around to adjust the shelves.
Also on these shelves is my Apple Time Capsule and a 1tb drive with all the backups for all the Mac’s here at home, as well as untold client DVD backups and other business materials.
As you probably deduced from the headline, disaster attempted to strike as I was standing in front of the shelves. One of the screws pulled loose and dumped three shelves and their contents into my arms. I caught the shelf with the electronics, but the majority of the 200 or so DVD’s cascaded around me and over my son’s and my computers.
Failure analysis points to the screws attaching the metal strips to perhaps not have been into studs in the wall. I’ll look into it more tomorrow, but a rebuilding is in order, using a stud finder first.
At least we were home when it happened. By the way, the movie we ended up watching was 1974’s Irwin Allen disaster epic The Towering Inferno.
Till tomorrow,
Chris