When Lightning Strikes

Just sharing a personal experience that happened somewhere around 8:30 PM CST. So give or take it was a couple of hours ago. The weather has been crappy all day but there were no indications that what happened would happen.

Like I do most of the time I was setting at my desk working. In fact I was actually working to update some pages on Condells which I don’t do to often.

Here is what happened.

My office is small. I set about 4 feet from an outside wall that has a large window. While I was working there was a loud bang like an explosion. Simultaneously there was a flash of light that appeared to be right in my office. Frankly the way the flash of light appeared it scared the crap out of me.

Only one circuit breaker tripped. Of course it was the one for my office. Fortunately I have a good battery and surge protector that deals with sudden power loss or surges of electricity like lightning can cause. My PC was shut down went off in spite of the battery but as far as I can tell there was no damage done.

The bang or explosion was so powerful, that some spray cans were knocked off a shelf in the bathroom. The TV in my bedroom was knocked off the wall shelf it set on. Right now it looks like it will have to be replaced. The TV in my office is fine so it was probably the fall that did it.

In my office the phone lines were fried. I have 3 incoming lines and nothing worked. On investigating I discovered the outside lines coming into the office were fine. The problem only related to the lines and couplers inside the office.

The electrical surge the lightning caused was so great some of the inside lines burned apart. At least 4 couplers were literally blown apart.

Once I had determined that the outside lines were working, I was able to get one inside line going so I could connect to the Internet. I’ll get everything restored tomorrow but I was only able to scrape up enough parts to get one line working tonight. Since I’m so addicted to life on-line I had to bet back on-line if possible.

If you have read this far I want to tie this incident into search engines, and search engine spam.

If your a search engine spammer (known as a black hat), you may be cruising along just fine. You think all your tactics are working just fine. Suddenly your sites drop off the search index. What happened?

Like a flash of lightning the search engines suddenly come down on your tactics that have previously worked.