New Office, Burst Pipe!

As I have mentioned in previous blog entries, the office I was given as a teaching assistant is in a building that would be better off condemned. The office itself is particularly bad, so Felisa said I was more than welcome to set up shop in her big lab. Last week I finally started doing work in their, and I am slowly bringing in my things to get comfortable. I got much more work done this week because I had a comfortable and permanent place to go to. As a bonus, one of the other students comes in to do work and plays interesting music, so it's like a super productive work party.

Yesterday morning I came in to my new space and noticed a weird mark on the floor, it looked like someone had spilled a whole bunch of tea or coffee. The spot was partially dry, and I checked the ceiling above me but didn't see any dripping or other indications of water. I decided someone must have spilled something, and that there wasn't anything wrong.

I came back later in the afternoon to find the rest of my lab in their investigating the steam pipes with a maintenance guy for the building. Apparently one of the steam pipes was leaking (I remember now previously hearing a strange noise coming from the ceiling). The leak was on the other side of the room, directly above one of the lab computers. The water spot I had seen in the morning had come from the computer, under the desk, under a book shelf, and then over to the middle of the room where I found it.

Luckily, the computer is okay and no data was lost. Fred backed everything up in case their were any other problems, and they will be fixing the pipe during spring break. However, we did discover that the pipes were surrounded by asbestos, which is not such a good thing. They will be removing all that when they fix the pipe. Just in case, I'm going to bring all of my stuff home until the problem is resolved.