Most of us are hurting right now. The past 2 weeks have been devastating in so many ways. We have laid people off, looked the screen printing grim reaper in the eye, or even worse, have seen loved ones getting sick.

Last Friday a large storm rolled through Fort Worth and a lighting strike hit our building. Nearly everything in our shop is plugged into a surge protector, but recently we added a network switch that we plugged straight into the wall without thinking. The lightning strike caused a power surge that went into the network switch, fried the switch and sent current through our internal ethernet network all of the way to our direct-to-screen unit. Unfortunately, this fried the ethernet card to our direct-to-screen unit. The only way to repair it is to replace the CPU at a cost of $3000. This is a large cost at any time, but right now…?

Lesson learned, make sure everything is on a surge protector. A $25 piece of equipment could save you $3000 or more. Also, make sure you have surge protectors and not just power strips. There is a big difference!