Went to the departmental holiday party...ate, drank, and was merry. Came home to an inbox full of messages from students asking what had happened to my web site. Checked it...or tried to. It was gone. No trace of my account. No syllabi. No links pages. Worst of all, no blog. It was like walking out to the parking lot and finding your car stolen. Or coming home and finding your belongings out on the street. Vertigo-inducing.
Happily, our sysadmin actually answered a page at 5:30pm on a Friday--after a holiday party. Wow. NIS errors corrected, web site reappears, I can breathe again.