Well, surviving my first blackout was fun. On Thursday afternoon, I was setting up a test at the garage when all the power went out in the building. At first, I thought it was just a regular power outage, similar to the one that had happened a couple of weeks prior. I waited around a few minutes to see if the power would come back on, and when it didn�t, I decided to head home.
One of my coworkers asked for a ride back to the office, so I said that I would drive him. We got in my car and were talking about the various catastrophies that might happen because of the traffic lights that would be out. I had assumed that it was only a few blocks that were without power.
Damn, was I ever wrong.
When we saw all of the cars starting to pile up at the nearest traffic light, I turned on the radio only to hear some stupid DJ say that terrorists were attacking us, and that it wasn�t just our little section of metro-Detroit that was out. It was more like the entire eastern seaboard of the US.
Of course it made sense that terrorists were attacking us. I mean, New York City, Toronto, Detroit, and most of Ohio were out. This, of course, did not help traffic.
I dropped my coworker off at the office while he tried, in vain, to call his wife. He was supposed to meet her at their apartment if anything like that had every happened and was freaking out that the cell network was down.
T-mobile, as usual, was not working.
I love that company. In the middle of a state of emergency, my cell phone never works.
It took me an hour to get home. Everyone was driving like the apocolypse was happening. People were going the wrong way down streets, motorcyclists were driving between the cars, no on was stopping properly at the lights. Thankfully, cops had started to direct traffic the closer I got to home (though, they were often posted at the most ridiculous places�not the busy intersections).
I got home, my mom was just lying in her bed reading. She was acting as if nothing was even happening. Apparently, my stepfather, had decided to go find batteries at a store, which, I found extraordinarily funny.
If all of Detroit was without power, how, exactly, was he going to get batteries at a store?
He did manage to find a Home Depot that was operating on low capacity generators, so he did get some batteries for the radio.
All the while, I had visions of 9/11 running through my head. By this time, I had known that it was not terrorists, but I had the feeling that my stepfather would be glued to that radio just like he was with the TV during 9/11. He kept running in and out of the house, preparing us as if we wouldn�t have power for weeks. He filled up buckets and jugs with water, even though my mom had told him that I had practically an arsenal of bottled water in the basement.
I, on the other hand, was still hung over from my message board meeting from the night before. None of this was even coming close to fazing me. I was just lying on the couch, staring off into space, biding my time before I could properly go to bed. I tried my cell phone a few times to get ahold of a few people that I was worried about, but it was to no avail: T-mobile is the big pink T from hell.
We visited my grandparents, who, surprisingly enough, were relatively calm about the whole situation. Of all the paranoid people on earth, I was almost positive that they were going to give me some new theories to ponder. However, they were calm, collected, and even fun to talk to.
We got back, and I gave up on any hope to finding out when we would actually get power back and went to sleep.
I woke up the next morning to try and call the emergency number at work to find out the status of the building. As I did so, my phone beeped like crazy. I had something like a dozen voicemails from people because my stupid cell phone was the only one that didn�t work.
Did I mention that I love T-mobile?
It turned out that the emergency number for work was down (isn�t that great?), so I just wandered around the house for awhile before deciding to give up completely on attempting to go to work.
Instead, I invited R, the Life Floater, on a little adventure to see if we could find a place that had power (and gas, and food, and etc.). We ventured over to my dad�s to find no power, and then we drove around for awhile.
People were acting like frantic nutcases. They were swarming every gas station within miles at even the thought that gas might be in there. I swear that I should have brought out my video camera and made a �mockumentary� of this whole thing.
As for the rest of the day���
�..you have no idea how badly I want to talk about what I did on Friday evening�.but I�m just not ready to tell just everyone yet.
But I am pretty damn happy. =D
On that note: HAPPY BDAY VYLETTE!!!!!!!!!!!
