(Restarted, for reasons which will shortly become apparent.)
Sitting at my desk, 0812. Get an e-mail from FedEx: my package has been delivered. Bit early, and I hadn't seen any delivery vehicle come nor go, but whatever. Huh. Also, there's a fresh e-mail from Wal-Mart telling me my package has been delivered; the package I was expecting today via FedEx wasn't from Wal-Mart. Anyway, go fetch the package.
Not by the garage door. Not on the front porch. I wonder just whither the package was delivered...?
Back to my office. The overhead light is off, and the fan is just coming to a stop. Hmmm...? The UPS isn't beeping. Lights elsewhere are all working. Fetch a voltage probe and commence poking around. It seems to think there's power to the wall switches.
Look at the breaker panel. There's one AFCI breaker tripped: for the master bedroom. Reset it. While I'm there, also jiggle the AFCIs for bedrooms 2~4. Office light remains off.
Begin composing this. Take another look at the e-mail from FedEx. The delivery time was yesterday, not today, and it refers to one of the three packages indeed delivered yesterday.
Take a closer look at the outlet situation. Observe that the shelf of tablets and old cellphones doesn't seem to be charging. Fetch a better grade of outlet tester than the probe. Yup: no power to the outlet. Also, the computers have now shut down. Apparently I'd silenced the UPS's beeper some time ago, and it had remained silenced.
So! Seems the overhead fixture and the outlets, in each bedroom, are on the same circuit, with an AFCI because of the overhead fixture. Go take another look at the breakers. Bedrooms 2 and 3 (2 being, I think, my office), the breakers are not in the tripped position, but fall to the tripped position if touched. Flip them firmly to off, then firmly to on. Check office: light and fan are on, and the computers are booting up.
So! When I went out to check on the spurious FedEx delivery, some weird electrical event set off the AFCIs for maybe three of the bedroom circuits? Southmoon is lying peacefully atop my office bookcase, looking entirely unlike a critter that's just shot mighty bolts of lightning from her ears. It's bright and sunny outdoors, with no sign of a thunderstorm.
Maybe the ESD when I stood up from my chair set things off. That commonly (during heating season, anyway) blanks my monitor for a moment. Did it somehow fool multiple AFCIs?
... And I'd just this morning been watching a vid on humidifiers. Maybe we do need a much bigger humidifier.
Update: Got a call about 1158, from the FedEx office in Knoxville. Apparently a 40-pound package that was supposed to have been delivered here wasn't properly accounted for. Well, I was expecting two such packages yesterday, and they both showed up. Maybe the driver only scanned one of them.
Clarification: The voltage probe gives a pretty good indication of a circuit being safe. Being powered, now... well, the probe will often trigger on being moved in the vicinity of a random piece of metal, energized or not. Kind of a hypersensitive danger indicator; it doesn't give false negatives, but false positives are common. So, it'll give the impression that a circuit is energized when it isn't, but won't give the impression that a circuit is safe when it's dangerous.
Update 2: Come evening, my father noted that the power was off in his bedroom (#4). Apparently I hadn't successfully reset that breaker, nor was it obvious that it had tripped.
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