The area’s electric power went down. It was a valley-wide outage affecting all of our little city, along with several other small cities. Turned out to be a major transmission line failure. A crew went out and found and fixed it.
Electricity ceased about 11:24 AM. I was at my writing haunt, which is a locally known coffee shop. It was suddenly so quiet, and a little darker. “The power is out,” a barista exclaimed.
Only three customers were in the shop. One barista looked over at me and asked, “What did you do, Michael?”
I was innocent, of course. We were all told to leave. Turned out it wasn’t just that little corner of existence.
I drove home. All the traffic lights were out. People were handling it with courtesy and awareness in my part of town, but others later said they witnessed some flagrant driver idiocy. Takes all kinds, we agreed.
It’s weird how something like this can affect the day. Like, okay, power is out. I drove home. Clicked on the garage door opener to verify it didn’t work and parked in the driveway. Went in with a key to the side door. I was thinking what will I do with this time? Well, I can still write on the computer. I just won’t be on the net. Battery will last a while. Or I can dust furniture or cut the lawn.
A smoke detector was announcing that its battery was on low. So I located it, got out the small metal step ladder and took care of that. I remember my wife not wanting me to purchase those little steps. “Just use a chair,” she urged. But I figured we were adults and should have the proper tool for the job, so I paid the $40 for the stairs.
My wife then arrived home. She didn’t have any house keys, and I saw her trying to ring the doorbell. After I let her in, we wondered, what does work for us? Can we get texts and make phone calls? She had one text from the county telling about the outage. I called her. Her phone rang but we couldn’t connect.
So we sat and talked. Not like we don’t sit and talk every day but something new is always coming up. Then I get a text from my sister saying, “I see trump just screwed up again.”
I texted back, “what happened? We don’t have power.” But my text wouldn’t go. How could I receive a text but not send one?
Fifteen minutes later, the power was back on. It too much longer than the outage lasted to return to the rhythm of the day.
Michael Seidel, writer 
Hi Michael. Sorry I am late to this, I seem to always be at least two days behind. 😋😀😂
One reason you might not be able to use your phone is if your phone defaults to use your Wi-Fi and internet which goes down due to a power outage, unless you have battery back up systems on the modem and router. I also have them on all computers. But if you have your network on for your phone and the network goes down, the phone forgets to transfer itself to cellular data. When we lose internet I have to shut Ron’s devices and my devices, phones and tablets off the network so we can still use them for online stuff. As I said it doesn’t affect us for power outages that last less than several hours due to the back-up batteries. I hope this helps for the next time. Oh … funny story about talking to your spouse. My husband of 34 years had an infected wisdom tooth removed this morning. When he got home he was not able to talk. Before thinking, I asked him how long this joyous miracle of him not being able to talk was going to be blessing me.
He did not see the humor in what I said and slapped me on my shoulder in frustration. 😛😜😝🤐😀
Hugs. Scottie
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Hi Scottie. Hope went well. I use that same brand of humor with my spouse, with much the same result.
No, I don’thave any UPS on my home net system. Was a time when I did, but that’s passed. Yes, I have my phone set up to default to web calling. Don’t know what her settings are. What surprised me was the differences in capabilities. That she received some calls and texts while poor poor pitiful me and my device got nada. But then, I bought a cheap model because I had divorced myself from carrying phones and pagers after a lifetime of doing so in the military and then in corporate life.
Hugs ‘n cheers
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Hi Michael. As for differences in phones. For years here in our mobile home park I would use my past training in computers and systems to help the people here with their computers / phone / printers / network problems. I found that Apple phones worked much easier and better at syncing with printers than other brands and Apple tablets much better than other kinds at joining networks and finding printers / printing. Yes Apple is expensive if you don’t keep up with the newer ones. We went from 6 gen to 12 gen and it cost us $1,400 each. I keep trying to convince Ron that we need to do it now to the newest one so we don’t have that huge costs. Anyway, best wishes. Hugs. Scottie
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