Aug 24, 2011

The Great Shake of 2011

It is just about 2pm on Tuesday afternoon and I’m minding my own business in my office (i.e. sitting at my desk and writing code and scratching my head wondering why the results aren’t what I expected them to be) when out of the blue it felt like I’m wobbling uncontrollably. I look at my cup of coffee and notice that it is empty. Did I have too much coffee? No, that can’t be it, it had only been my second (small) cup of the day. I had just eaten, so it wasn’t that I was hungry either. I start thinking, “Wow, I’m really not feeling great, the whole room feels like it’s moving back and forth.” I work sitting on an exercise ball (something like this one), so I stand up to see if my equilibrium is off and I’m just rolling on the ball. Nope, the room still feels shaky. Not knowing what else to do, I open my office door and see if, per chance, leaving the office would make me feel better. Lo and behold, there are others congregated outside wondering what is going on.

Now, in most other buildings my first thought would have been, “Ah hah! It’s an earthquake,” but no, I work in the Stata Center that the architect (Frank Gehry) himself once said, “looks like a party of drunken robots got together to celebrate.” (Others have called it Toon Town on steroids, but that is neither here nor there.) The fact that there are leaks in the building and MIT has taken the architect to court made my mind wander in the direction of “Oh no, here we go. One of those diagonal pillars finally gave way.” As anyone that has grown up in an area with lots of earthquakes knows, in case of an earthquake, stay indoors, get under a desk or a door frame, and stay clear of things that can fall. But, what did I (along with many others) do? I made my way to the nearest fire escape and practically ran out of the building. Yes, really smart.

But, not to worry. Nothing was damaged, no one was hurt, and the photo above was staged. And, like someone said on the CSAIL mailing list after we all got back to our desks, “we often joke about how this building looks like it has been in an earthquake… I guess this legitimizes that comment to some extent…” So, it looks like us Bostonites made it through an earthquake and are here to tell the tale. And to mother nature I say, “You’re going to have to throw a whole lot more at me if you want to stop me from graduating!*”

*(”But please, mother nature, don’t”)

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