Electric Personality

I have a friend who used to think she could turn off streetlamps. She'd walk under them and the bulb would suddenly go out, and this seemed to happen far more than what one would consider normal. Well, I'm starting to wonder if there's something in my aura that is destructive to entire power grids.

On Wednesday I went to a half day seminar on leadership put on by the local Chamber, held on a university campus in Denver. Around 2pm I was drinking Coke and poking myself in the leg to stay awake--I mean really engaged and paying attention--when someone walked up to the speaker and attempted to whisper in his ear but caught his microphone instead: "The power is going to go out in the entire building from 2:15 to 2:45." Well, this was vastly more interesting information than the seminar lecture, so everyone immediately started talking. When one woman realized that there were no windows along the route to or in the bathrooms to provide light when the power went out, a small panic ensued while everyone rushed to use the toilet one last time. As all the women were fleeing the room, the speaker went over to the host and university rep with a serious scowl on his face. I couldn't blame him: this event had been planned for months and was supposed to be a classy affair, with a catered lunch and happy hour drinks brought in afterward. A half hour of darkness in the middle of the event wasn't really in the schedule. How had no one known about this planned outage until 15 minutes before it happened?

As it turned out the power was only out for about 10 minutes, and we were able to continue without much interruption (once all the women were back from the bathroom, that is) because the windows in the room provided plenty of light. The speaker wasn't able to use his PowerPoint presentation, but that was actually a significant improvment because what he was saying didn't really match his slides anyway.

The whole thing was pretty strange, but what is really strange is that this has happened to me three times in the last month. Two weeks ago the power went out on our entire block from 11pm to 1am. There was no storm, no road construction to cut a cable, no car accident to bring down a powerline pole: it just went out. You might think it was a fairly convenient time for the power to go out, but it was darn hot that night, and without air conditioning or a ceiling fan our upstairs bedroom quickly because miserable.

And a few weeks before that, when we were stopping for the night en route to Salt Lake City, the entire town of Vernal, UT was without power from 5am to 9am. We showed up at a hotel in Vernal to get a room for the night, and they had a piece of paper taped to the counter that said "The electricity in the entire town will be down from 5am to 9am Sunday, June 27. Please excuse the inconvenience." Since the next town with a hotel is hours away in that part of the world, there really was no other option. We paid for the room, and since Harper wouldn't sleep that night unless someone was holding her, I was awake and sitting on the sofa when someone flipped the city-wide switch. I had thought it wouldn't be that big of a deal, because once again we had a window and we weren't planning to sit around watching TV during that time, but I didn't really think about how essential the fan system is in a hotel. Thirty seconds after the power went out it was eerily quiet in the room, and then suddenly you could hear the person in the room next door snoring, the guy on the other side let out a big fart, and the people across the hall whispering. Without a fan a hotel is like a collection of large-scale cubicles, with zero sound-proofing. And incredibly hot and stuffy. We bailed shortly after 5.

So first Vernal, then the unexplained outage on our own block, and them the unexpected "planned" outage at the university this week. I can't help but wonder, is it me? Turning off streetlamps is one thing, but entire power systems is a menace to society.