Storms, power outages, and putting it all into some kind of perspective

Last night, I was sitting down to watch the season finale of Warehouse 13. It’s a quirky show that I’ve learned to like, and I was looking forward to see how they handled the final character arc they were playing out. Ten minutes into it, the cable provider’s satellite message appeared instead of the signal and indicated that it was having trouble connecting. Ten minutes after that, the message changed to “Acquiring Signal” and then suddenly all of the power went out.

So I sat in my apartment for fifteen minutes, thinking the power would eventually pop back on, but it never did. I found a flashlight to help me maneuver around the very dark apartment, and then figuring it was late enough, I went to bed.

The next morning, the power still was not on. Now, in the past I might have panicked and started thinking about all of the stuff in my fridge melting and going bad. But instead, I thought I get paid on Friday, and so what if I end up having to rebuy all of my groceries on that day. It’s not that big a deal.

Today’s a work day, so I got dressed in the pitch dark blackness and then went out to start my car. Well, I discovered a new problem: My garage door does not open without actual electricty. My garage is not attached to the apartment, so there was absolutely no way to get into it. My housing complex never bothered to include a key to the garage, so I realized I was not getting into my car. The housing complex’s manager’s office was also completely empty; apparently someone figured that with the power being off, it wasn’t a good deal to come into work on time. I guess they figured NO ONE would be interested in talking to the manager’s staff on a day when the entire complex was out of power. But oh well.

So I walked to the bus and took it to work. Haven’t done that in over a year, and it’s a very long walk to the bus, but I did it.

But all during this time I was walking, I examined the ramifications of the downed power grid. For about twenty minutes of walking, there was absolutely no power at all, although I did hear a generator working on one of the buildings. And then suddenly there were lights at about the twenty minute mark from where I lived. This area was not hit by the loss of power, or at least they had their power restored since it happened.

And this got me thinking about how little prepared so many people are for simple little hardships like this. I had a few flashlights in my apartment, so I was at least able to see. One of them burned out really fast, which told me that I had bought a pretty crappy flashlight. The others worked better, but it’s no fun finding out your flashlight is a cheap piece of crap when you need it most. It reminded me of some of those horror movies where someone’s in the dark, turns on her flashlight, and then a few seconds later it goes out. Makes the scene even scarier than if she never had light in the first place. But I digress.

What was interesting to me is that I’ve been through a few power outages over the years, including a few earthquakes that took place in California. And each one of those events caused me to prepare a little bit more for the next time. Each new scenario I came across made me feel a little bit more prepared for the next time, and that always felt good.

This time, I didn’t feel like I was really lacking all that much, and there was very little reason to panic. I did, however, hear quite a few muffled fights going on between couples and families in my apartment complex. This new entrance of events did not bode well for quite a few of them. And I wondered if this would cause them to be more prepared next time, or would it just cause them to complain a lot until things came back under normal, and then they’d be unprepared for next time as well. I don’t really know how they’ll handle it.

And that leaves me wondering about how well people are prepared for handling bad situations that they might come across. I know people have a tendency to go off like poffy hairdressers every time something doesn’t work out the way they planned, but what if something happens that occurs over a length of time? How do people handle that, and can they? I’ve been watching this BBC show “Survivors”, which is about a fictitious disaster that happens, leaving a small segment of the British population alive. It took place in the 1970s, but it was interesting how poignant those events were and how relevant they could be for today. If something happened that took away our sense of normalcy, how well would we handle ourselves? Would we live long and prosper (sorry, bad Vulcan humor) or would we end up panicking until we wasted away or died?

Unfortunately, I don’t have the answers to that. I’d like to think we’d never have to find out, but I fear that the answers aren’t ones I’d really like to hear.