20 Jan 2006 Beacon’s Light Shines Despite Flood
As I write this Brief there are about five men in my office cutting sheetrock and removing insulation. It has been a dusty and noisy week spent in the drone of high speed drying fans and dehumidifiers. Last weekend our offices were flooded. Patty’s and my Monday holiday plans were subordinated when we received word from our building’s manager that our office was filled with about an inch and a half of water. It seems a refrigerator icemaker line in the office above us burst (the night of Friday the 13th maybe?) and ran undiscovered through the weekend.
When I arrived that morning a crew was vacuuming the water as quickly as they could but everything on the floor was fully soaked. Our computer servers were just below the waterfall above, but fortunately none fell directly on the sensitive machines and the rising water level did not get high enough to do damage. Once we assured the computers safety we began moving our furniture and furnishings to higher, dryer ground.
Our offices are on the twelfth floor of a 32-story office building. Flooding is not a high probability on our disaster plan, but rest assured, it is there. Because of the measures we routinely take in the course of our business all of our computers, data, and records are safe and duplicated. If we had indeed lost our servers, it would have been a huge inconvenience, but we would have replaced them and loaded the backups to get up and running in a matter of a day or two.
Patty and I elected not to move our office to temporary quarters but to work through the demolition and re-fit. With our communications and network systems running smoothly we decided to put up with the mess and noise while benefiting from the certainty of uninterrupted data and communication feeds on our current network. A move would have subjected us to untold installation delays from our telephone, data, and information technology providers. We were pretty sure that we wouldn’t be running smoothly in a temporary location before it was time to move back into our offices.
There is some good news to share in the midst of all the chaos. Our shiny new website debuts today. Some tweaking and polishing remains to be done, but we are very excited about the new site and hope you will enjoy using it. Please take a look at www.beaconinvest.com.
I am also pleased to report winning the Triangle Business Journal’s six-month stock contest. We hold or have held most of the stocks in the winning portfolio in our Quest Portfolio. The stock contest portfolio consists of 5 stocks, most of which performed very well during a short period of time. The Quest portfolio consists of twenty five companies selected for long-term appreciation while diversification mitigates risk. A copy of the article is included.
