1/2 Power Outage

Well, that's something I'd never seen before.

Lights and outlets in various rooms went out but others were just fine, and flipping the circuit breakers did nothing. Obviously not a power failure since we were still getting power. And luckily the outlets with all of the Computer Stuff were in the latter category. But, still, WTF?

Turns out, we had a 1/2 power failure. Evidently if you have coming in a neutral wire and 2 hot lines at 110V each of varying phases, and something munches on one of the hot lines, you still get Power but it's Weirdly Dysfunctional Power. Power Company people arrived and now we have our very own Personal Transformer to turn the one hot line back into something our house understands. And then sometime in the next week or two somebody will be back to do Actual Digging to figure out where and how the line got munched and what to do about it for the long term. Wheee.

(...note that Lambda/etc is on a UPS once again and so should cope just fine with the brief service interruptions that will inevitably occur while they're fixing this. Unless we get an interruption that's not so brief. Or whatever it is comes back and munches one of the other lines in the interim; that would be fun...)