The Power Situation 09 Jul, 2007
In my little efficiency room there was at first no light. None of the plugs worked either (fact: European style, with the ground nub). Even in the bathroom. About 10 minutes of pushing buttons later, I noticed a little orange light on next to the entrance door… with… oh! a card slot in the top. Insert room key, hey this is kind of neat. The electricity is only on when I’m in the room now, and there’s a handy place for me to remember my key with when I leave.
The great part is when I leave the electricity goes off. The bad part is when I leave the electricity goes off, which includes anything I had charging. Oh, and they do have high-speed internet (a half-T1 methinks) but it’s being transmitted via wi-fi from the front lobby and I’m in the back of the second floor so it doesn’t reach. And there aren’t any plugs near the second floor lobby, so I pretty much have to spend 1+ hour in my room charging, then I get 2 hours of Internet back by the lobbies.
The connection is also occasionally flaky, I’ve had rsync die on me twice and OpenVPN once during the 30 minutes I was playing with it.
I went back to my room and wanted to charge my phone (which still doesn’t work, just like in Germany… the T509 as-is doesn’t seem to be able to negotiate with European towers, even though I got 4 bars of signal back in Germany, 2 bars here) at the same time as using my laptop. So I switched the interchangeable end on my Mac’s charger back to U.S., plugged it into the power strip I brought and put on that an adapter so it’d fit the wall. Both devices I had on the strip can work with 240v so I figured it’d not be that big a deal.
Ha! Pop, fizzle. Lights go out. No it’s not just the keycard, I checked that.
Talk to the front desk. “You broke what?! Oh, electricity. We’ll fix it, go back to your room.” The power strip’s circuit breaker fried quite nicely under the higher voltage (note to self: this only works the other way, with European strips on U.S. voltage).
Dude comes up, tries his master keycard and we notice that with the door open we hear something at the other end of the hall going “click” whenever we toggle it. This is the circuit breaker panel, we find out, which has no lock on it whatsoever. His solution is to turn every breaker off and then back on again, nevermind that they’re clearly labeled by room number. Still no worky.
Flip everything off including the sub-main, back on. Yay. Hope my neighbors don’t know it’s me that ruined their tv movie.
And my laptop charger still works, yay! So I can do my laptop + one other device. (before coming, I verified that my camera charger, cell charger [used in place of a watch], laptop, and Netgear WRT54GC can all operate on 240V)