When I got to work on Friday, Clyde the doorman was grim-faced.
"There's no power on this block."
I was momentarily gleeful. I love power outages. Ever since I was a kid and a serious windstorm knocked out power in our neighborhood and it turned into a party with the kids next door I've been enamored of what happens when there's no electricity. We're forced to slow down, change our plans, get creative. During that stormy night outage in my childhood, my sister and I ran between our neighbor's house and our own, finding out whether they were blacked out or if it was just us. We returned with some of the neighbor kids (there were 7 total at the time) and found that my father had brought the Coleman lantern out of storage in the garage. It was lit and hanging from the chain of the now useless electric light over our kitchen table. Betrayed by technology, my father got resourceful. He'd also lit a huge fire in the fireplace so the house was warm and well lit, and it felt like a camping trip in our living room. We sat around laughing and talking for hours and when the lights came back on I was amazed to discover that the Coleman lantern actually threw more light than the electric lights and lamps in our living room. I was disappointed when the blackout ended and life returned to normal.
"You can't get into your office either," Clyde continued, referring to the electricity-dependent badge system we use to control access. "Unless you have a key?"
Which, of course, I don't.
"I think Jeff's up there though," Clyde finished. That didn't surprise me. Jeff is almost always at the office before I am, and I get in pretty early.
"Well I guess I'll head up and pound on the door," I replied, giving a wave and heading for the elevator. I tend to forget the inconveniences of a power outage, you see. Like the fact that the elevators won't be working. After taking my first step toward the elevator my brain came back on-line and I turned towards the stairs before Clyde noticed where I was going (or maybe he's just too much of a gent to have said anything).
The three flights to our office weren't too much of a hardship although I don't know why I didn't just go get a coffee or something. It's not like my sitting at my dark desk would help the power come back any sooner, and everything I do at work, from writing documents to testing software to using the phones, depends on electricity. But the closest Starbuck's is around the corner and if the whole block didn't have power then Starbuck's would be blacked out too. There's a coffee shop across the street from our building and they're on a different grid so they had power. But I've never trusted the place - from the state of their front window it doesn't look like the most hygienic option around. For all I know it's a great greasy spoon but it doesn't look like the right place to order an espresso.
Our office door was propped open so no pounding was required (which is good because the doors are heavy steel numbers and hurt your hands if you have to knock. I know because I've forgotten my badge on occasion). Once I got to my desk and dropped off my bag, I was at a bit of a loss. My usual routine is to boot up my machine and while Windows spends the next 27 minutes deciding whether or not I'll be able to access my desktop I put my lunch in the fridge and fill up the first of several 40 oz bottles of water of the day.
I went ahead and put my lunch in the now tepid office fridge, though it wasn't much colder inside than out. But I figured that the air in the fridge might be less hazardous in terms of contamination than the free-flowing city air that comes through our open warehouse windows. On the other hand, someone's salami sandwich might still be lurking in the shadows of the fridge, forgotten by a former employee and left to commence a slow rise to sentience. You know how office refrigerators can be.
Thus divested of my bag and lunch and armed with a bottle of water so cold it set my teeth on edge, I returned to my desk. To what end, I couldn't tell you. It was 8:30 in the morning, which is a little too early to start phone-screening candidates for my still vacant tester position, and besides, the phones were down too.
For the first time I noticed how eerily quiet the office was. Even when I'm the only person in the place there's always a big fan running in front of the server closet and the whine of my PC. And I usually wear headphones when I'm working so there's always something to listen to. One thing I really love about blackouts is the silencing of those white noise sounds I almost don't hear anymore. Suddenly I hear a hole in the soundscape and I can hear things I wouldn't have heard otherwise.
That was about the time that the incessant beeping of the fire alarm out in the hallway started to get annoying. When the power goes out, the fire alarm starts bitching by continuously and rapidly emitting a high pitched beep. I have no idea why it does this. It doesn't seem to help anything or tell anyone anything they didn't already know. It only succeeds in reminding you that the power is out and the fire alarm is still in the building.
Humans are endlessly adaptable though, and after a few minutes I tuned out the fire alarm. The one thing we can't really ignore, though, is nature's call, and after half a bottle of water, I was hearing that loud and clear.
One of my favorite quotes is "Adventure is danger and discomfort reflected upon later, in relative safety." Now I'll grant you that a trip to a pitch-black restroom isn't exactly dangerous or even that much more than a minor inconvenience, but it still felt like an adventure anyway. I have a knack for making just about anything into a 1940's serial adventure. "SEE our intrepid heroine brave the unknown PITS of despair in each and EVERY toilet stall! WATCH as she cleverly navigates the walls using ONLY her heightened sense of TOUCH!" That sort of thing.
So armed with the light from my cell phone (which I thought was a nice way to MacGyver the situation), I headed into the restroom. I'm not afraid of the dark or anything, so it really wasn't a problem. After a minute or two a woman with an actual flashlight entered the ladies room and I said, "Oh, a flashlight. That's a good idea." The sound of my disembodied voice apparently wigged the woman out and she yelped, "Oh my God!". I don't really understand that. She wouldn't have been able to see me even if the lights had been on, and who's going to be waiting for you in a blacked out ladies restroom? A serial killer who only strikes during power outages?
I apologized for scaring her and she said that actually it was less creepy to be in the darkened restroom now that she knew someone was in there with her. I resisted the urge to comment. We chatted about the power outage, trading scanty knowledge ("It was out when I got here this morning." "Our secretary said it went out about an hour ago. I hope it's not going to be like the East Coast…") in the way that strangers will when brought together by the same inconvenience. While washing our hands we agreed that it was a nice surprise not to have to work as soon as we walked into the office but that we'd inevitably have to stay later to make up the lost time and that sucked. We wished each other good luck as we headed back to our respective offices as though this were an event we could change if our fortunes were only in our favor.
When I got back to my desk I picked up my "Learning the Bash Shell" book and tried to concentrate on remembering the arguments for the grep command. Not the most mind stimulating way to pass the time. I spent most of the next 45 minutes staring at the book and trying not to listen to the beeping of the fire alarm. My boss came into the office with a coffee he'd walked three blocks to get and we wandered downstairs since we had nothing better to do, talking shop.
Standing outside and watching people rushing off to their well-lit jobs, I felt a sense of well being. I was ready to work, I had my day planned out, but I wasn't working and it was through no fault of my own. It was the satisfaction of playing hooky without the guilt. Nothing to do about it but wait. I was willing to wait all day.
In the middle of a conversation about drugging kids in schools (don't ask - I was just listening), Clyde stuck his head out the front door of the building, "Power just flipped back on."
My boss and I looked at each other, a mixture of damn-we-have-to-go-back-in-and-work disappointment and let's-get-in-and-try-to-catch-up inevitability on both our faces. We followed Clyde into the building and asked if he thought the elevators were OK. I have to tell you I wasn't that hot to take the elevator just two minutes after the power had flipped back on since I know how sometimes when power is being restored it comes on, then goes off again. Being stuck in an elevator is sort of a fear of mine.
But, adventure is danger and discomfort and all that rot, and I only get to live once, so into the elevator I went. Apparently the adventure of the morning was over, as we reached the third floor, and our waiting work, with no further incident. I felt the same disappointment when the elevator doors slid open as I did when the lights came back on in our Coleman lantern light flooded living room when I was in elementary school. I guess some things never change.
- KNP Sept 7, 2003
