Power Outage

The last two days the power has been out in our office building, which was funny the first day, especially because one of the other offices in the building is a dentist office and the lady dentist ran out yelling, "Does anyone have a generator?!?! My patient is spread open like this **she demonstrates** and I'm afraid her Novocaine is going to wear off!"

"Novocaine doesn't take electricity does it?"

"No, but my drill does."

And then she ran up and down the halls asking if anyone had a generator. A generator? Really? This is an office building not a working power plant. Like one of those with a yellow sign out front with a symbol that can only mean something in soviet because really - what the heck does a dot and thick lines emanating from it really mean . . . .

Oh wait. I think this is one of those times I answered my question with my question.




Although it also totally looks like: Simon Says played here.



And it's gonna get smokey.


Anyway, the power being out lost it's appeal very quickly and all the other offices let their workers go for the day since there was nothing they can really do without their computers. But not us. We didn't even bring up the fact that we should go home and wait til tomorrow. And you know why?

Because our boss is blind.

She works twelve hours a day in the dark and manages to get a shit ton done, and oddly enough she's the one who figured out what the best way was for us to see and get our own shit done. Almost immediately she went about ordering people to open all the curtains for sunlight, use their cell phones for calculators, and pick up a pencil and write something for once in our lives.

And let me tell you . . . I got a lot of comics drawn.

But also, we still managed to get a lot of work done. Without the internet, without our computers, without printers, or copiers, or scanners, or our fax machine, or the little floor heater that keeps mah toes toasty during the day.

Every once in a while we had a buddy walk us to the bathroom to shine their cell phone over the stall in the pitch black so that we had some wiping light, but other than that things ran pretty smoothly. And it was really nice to be power free for a day. It reminded me how easy we have it, and how much I really miss looking things up in an actual book instead of googling it. Not that tax law is so thrilling, but it made me feel like I was studying for a final. A final I have to take by candlelight while sipping on cold coffee from the day before because, lo and behold, the coffee maker doesn't work without electricity either! How did people survive?! What'd they do? Heat actual coffee beans in a metal pan over an open flame and then . . .

Oh wait. I did it again!

See! Throw a girl into the woods and suddenly shit gets figured out. (Where 'woods' means, no electricity for a few hours. Save for the magic of the not-needed-to-be-plugged-in-cell-phone) (I don't have a fancy internets cell phone, so no, I did not cheat).

Anyway, clearly the power is back on again, otherwise I could not be typing this at my desk right now, and there's the thing - if the power was out I wouldn't be wasting valuable work time writing my blog. I'd be computing and adding and accounting for things. But then again, if the power was out I wouldn't be wasting valuable work time writing my blog. And you know what that means? You'd all have to hear from me by phone about what was happening in my life, and that just sounds exhausting. Do you know how much more of a tangent I can go on when I'm just talking??? Ask my mom about the day I started asking her about the first time homebuyer's credit and wound up sobbing on her desk about how horrible it must be to be struck with napalm and as a sidenote, how I'm too old to be on 16 and Pregnant.

Anyway, the blackout was sort of nice. It built a slight camaraderie between all of us, because our office stayed. We stuck it out. We prepared tax returns by the glow of a controlled wastebasket fire, and we peed with the help of the incredibly bright iPhone.

I sort of hope we make it a weekly thing.