I hate power outages.
I especially hate them when they occur an hour or so before I go to bed. Lots of lights are on. The TV is on. Sure as I go to bed and fall asleep, the power will come back on. And I’ll have to get up and turn everything off.
It’s not that simple, of course. As I sit here in the dark (not quite dark; I have a battery lantern on), it occurs to me that most of the clocks I reset a few days ago will probably have to be reset again. Among them are the thermostat, so the house won’t warm up when it’s supposed to in the morning. I think that means the house will still be cold when I wake up, but I’m too tired right now to figure it out.
Worse than a cold house, however, will be the coffee not starting when it’s supposed to, so instead of it being hot and fresh and waiting for me when I stumble into the kitchen, I’ll have to turn it on and wait for it …. and first thing in the morning is not the best time to tell me I’ll have to wait for my coffee.
Right now the suspense is getting pretty intense. It’s 11:40 pm and the online outage report website said 11:40 was the estimated time for power restoration. Obviously they were wrong, although they got my hopes up by blinking the lights briefly about 20 minutes ago.
I feel pretty silly sitting here waiting for the lights to come back on just so I can turn them off and go to bed. But we all know what will happen if I go to bed before they come back on …
Well I’ll be damned! 11:43 and the lights just came back on!! I take back everything I said about Xcel Energy.
Now all I have to do is go around and reset all the clocks.
Did I mention I hate power outages?
Power outages… yuck.
I agree. But I suppose it could have been worse — either in the middle of a heat wave or in the middle of a blizzard.
Technology is a thin membrane separating us from raw nature. I can think of nothing so much as electric power that demonstrates this so well. When it fails we loose not just lights, heat and air conditioning, but really everything that makes modern life work. (You can’t even pump gas into a car without electricity.)
I was surprised at first that you were able to start this post with the power off, but then I figured you must have been working on a laptop. I used to worry about losing that connection to the world, but now my iPhone is our backup source. Still, it’s a tenuous and vulnerable thread. I, for one, do not begrudge the electric company a single nickel of what I pay. Nor any other utilities for that matter. (Think Flint Michigan.)
This is just one more instance of the glaring differences between the parties. The GOP’s seem determined to ignore our crumbling infrastructure until it breaks.
You’re right, I use a laptop, although when I started writing, I didn’t have an internet connection. I was just using a local notepad app to kill time, figuring I’d copy and paste the entry when the power came back on. It came back on while I was writing.
I did feel very cut off, as you noted. My normal phone does run on on whatever battery power there is in the unit sitting in the base/recharger. Lacking that, I still keep an old hard-wired (pink Princess) phone that plugs directly into the phone jack and requires no electricity to work. It’s steady dial tone was very reassuring. The cell phone, of course, still worked, but I’ve rarely used it for typing any amount of text. I could have called someone if necessary, and I did try browsing the internet a bit, but the small screen discourages that. What I really wanted to see was Xcel’s map of the outage area, but couldn’t get it to load. I’m sure they were getting slammed with people like me, wanting to report the outage or see how big it was, etc. (I reported it by phone just seconds after the lights went off, but thirty minutes later their phone lines were so tied up I couldn’t even get through to their voice mail.
(FYI, I failed to get the coffeemaker properly reset. Its clock is so tiny it’s hard to see even in normal light.)
Hmm. That reminds me, I need to replace the batteries in our thermostat. They provide back up power when the electricity goes off, but the time usually goes askew pretty rapidly. Still, It is some convenience.
I’d forgotten my themostat has a battery back up and was delighted to find it was one less clock I had to reset. At most it only lost a couple of minutes.
What are power outages? Is this an American phenomena? ❓ …….(says he smugly hoping it will not come back to bite him!)
Oh it will come back to bite you, sooner or later … 😈
Force of habit – during a power outage I’ll walk into a room and turn the light switch on, even though I’m holding a flashlight…
Amazing how persistent those habits can be. Probably a good thing. Keeps us from having to constantly think about all the little things we do.
I thought about trying to turn everything off so I could go to bed, but I couldn’t remember for sure everything that had been on. And most of the lamps have 3-way bulbs that could have been on any one of several settings. I was as likely to turn some things on as off.