We got home yesterday at about 6pm, and the neighborhood seemed darker than usual. I didn’t think too much of it beyond that as I was on the phone with a friend having a heated discussion about rental contracts and cheating contractors. I was also having a text message conversation with another friend. My phone was looking low on battery but I figured I’d just plug it in when I got inside. Still deep in the phone conversation, I stepped into the house and popped on light switches. Nothing happened. I tried other switches. Then I walked back out to the driveway. “Um…the electricity’s out,” I announced.
“WHAT?!”
Right then our neighbor walked down the driveway to greet Mr. W. I went back in the house and made some attempts to light candles with one hand while gabbing on the phone with the other. Mr. W entered soon thereafter and said that according to the neighbor, the electricity’s been out for an hour and the electric company may take till 9:30p to fix it. Right then, in mid-sentence, my cell phone died. And I effectively hung up on my friend. Crap! Of course I can’t charge it without electricity.

I had a stroke of genius and ran upstairs to turn on my laptop. The sucker was fully charged and I could at least shoot an email to both people I was in mid-conversation with to explain things. Except, I soon found out, routers need electricity to work. I had no internet!

I sat down on the floor, defeated. I hate leaving people hanging. I couldn’t even turn my phone on to get phone numbers to call them back on the landline, which probably doesn’t work anyway because they’re all cordless phones that need the electrical base to work. This is why I’d been saying that we need at least one regular plug-in phone in the house, but does anybody listen to me?

Since it was not advisable to open the fridge for fear of letting the remaining cold air out, we walked a few blocks to a local Thai food restaurant for dinner. I was uncomfortable all evening, not being able to call people back, get online, or watch TV. You know how people sometimes assume that someone’s ignoring or flaking out on them, and there’s always somebody else, Ms. Reasonable Doubt, who says, “Maybe they just misplaced your number. Maybe they’re stuck in a meeting that ran late. Maybe they were in a car accident. Maybe a plane fell out of the sky and landed on their house and they’re trying to pick their way through the wreckage to safety but in the meantime had to use their cell phone to throw through the window to break the glass, because every other throwable item in their house is on fire, and the cell phone hit the sidewalk outside and broke, and you’ll get this explanation tomorrow when they’re back at work and can send you an email to explain it all.” Well, that really IS me this time. My cell phone died, the neighborhood is out of electricity so I couldn’t charge it to call back, the laptop works but the router needs electricity, all my phone numbers are stored in my dead cell so I couldn’t call even from a payphone, and electricity wasn’t restored until almost 1am when I was already asleep, so I couldn’t charge and call later in the evening, either. And all the alarm clocks were off when the power came back on so I woke up late this morning, too.

At least I already wrote a quick apology email this morning when I got in to work.

And I now learned that I can not live in colonial times. I missed my TV time.