On Sunday my family was given the esteemed pleasure of enduring a power failure in our neighborhood. I assumed that this outage would last a maximum of two hours, but I was wronger than that time in second grade when I thought that snow was made out of cotton. We used candles for light and warmth, which made the house look like were performing some sort of sacrificial ceremony ritual.
As I stayed in my room waiting for the electricity, I tried to come up with creative ways of generating heat, internet or electricity. First, I tried to recall the static electricity episode of “Bill Nye the Science Guy” and used static electricity from the carpet to attempt to power our cable modem. When this didn’t work, I channeled my inner MacGuyver and used a metal spoon, a glowstick, and a cotton satchel to try to make a non-electric lamp. When that experiment failed, I used my boy-scout survival instincts* to make a way out of no way. I connected my laptop to my phone to get internet access through the data connection, while simultaneously charging the dead phone. Also, while surfing the net I used the bright screen to light the room and the computer fan to blow warm air onto my frozen body. After these brief hours of what seemed like an earthly paradise of Shangri-La, I fell asleep while spooning my super-warm laptop.
At 6am the power came back to the house and it announced its re-arrival by using the loud house alarm. Never before was I so happy to hear a piercing “WHEEW-WHEEW-WHEEW” noise at 6am! After making sure that the lights and heat worked again, I forced myself to believe that the last 12 hours was a bad nightmare and I rolled over and fell back asleep…this time with the lights ON!!
*Note: I was never a boys scout, cub scout, or any other type of scout, but I watched a lot of MacGuyver episodes back in my day!