Power Outage...

This morning we had a power outage while at work. It was off for a couple of hours. Some people left for lunch (how can anyone eat lunch at 10:30 in the morning?) Some people even went home. But a few of us stayed through it. I had time to write in my journal, which I don't do frequently, but it was a great opportunity to write briefly about President-Elect Obama.

I also had time to think about what we'd do without electricity...for a longer time than just two hours. It reminded me of a day back in the 80s when the power was out from the afternoon into the night. I must have drove my mom crazy asking her when it would come back on and statements of increased boredom. It's amazing how we've created such a large dependency on this luxury that our ancestors didn't have. We "need" electricity because we've grown our lives with it. They're intertwined. Sometimes unseparable.

I remember a year or so ago when a girl I worked with said to me that she felt like she was missing a limb when her broadband internet connection went down for a few days. What if we didn't have electricity? Think of the savings. Would we die without electricity? Probably not physically.

Then again, a computer programmer without a computer is a wasted resource. So without electricity, I would be out of a job. Now that's scary!