Sunday, July 15, 2007

A Creative "Power" Pun Goes Here

So I said in my Order of the Phoenix review below that you should come back for my DWP adventures.

BTW, Cat, the movie actually wasn't that crowded -- it was in one of the huge (but not IMAX) screens and I would say a good 50 to 100 seats were left open.  I'm still going again (even if I can't get Patrick to come with; the Sirius stuff was hard on him) to see it in IMAX.

Anyway, I have a bad habit on weekends of sleeping in too late and then having trouble going to bed Saturday and Sunday night.  I tried to go to bed early last night in preparation for going to see OotP this morning, but no dice.  Then, around 2:00 or so -- I'd been attempting to sleep for about 1 1/2 hours -- my window air conditioner started to make weird noises.

I keep it set fairly cool at night; I can't sleep unless I'm 'swaddled,' so to speak, in blankets.  I suppose a deep pressure vest would be a good idea for me, if they made any that fit me.

Anyhow, I figured it'd just frozen -- window ACs do that sometime -- so, since it was fairly cool, I turned it off and didn't think much more about it.  I figured I'd wake up if I got hot and turn it back on.

Well...about 5:30, a strange sound -- silence -- jolts me right awake.

The power's out.

I peer outside.

Not just us.

I look up the DWP hotline on my iPhone (yay for EDGE, even if it is slow) and report the outage; 2 others have already done so.

So, I wet a washcloth, put it over my head, and try to sleep.  I toss and turn, dozing and waking up, and finally give up about 10:30 -- nearly 5 hours since the outage was reported.

I get ready to go to lunch and the movie.  By 11:00, still no power.  The DWP is going from manhole cover to manhole cover (our utilities are all underground) to try to figure out what's wrong.

By 12:00, the power's back on.

The DWP hotline, which I'd called during lunch just out of morbid curiosity, was still set at 7:30 a.m. and didn't record any outages at all.

Which brings me to a point: given the technological development of the last couple of decades, couldn't major utility hubs have a 10 minute generator so that they can phone home and say, "Help!  A transformer blew!" or "Help!  Something overloaded me!" or even "Help!  Error!  Error!  Error!"

In other words, the utility version of a kernel panic or the Blue Screen of Doom.

'Cause, you know, if we were in a less affluent area (where people, say, wouldn't have internet connected cell phones with which to look up the hotline number) and people couldn't report the outage right away -- that would have sucked.

So now I'm sitting her contemplating re-reading Order of the Phoenix ('cause I think I remember a couple of other things that weren't in the book) and silently blessing my AC.

Oh, and Cat -- I've had Deathly Hallows pre-ordered since the day Amazon announced it.  So I'll be reading next Saturday too.  Once you have a chance to see OotP, I'd be curious to hear your reaction to my review.  :-)

2 comments:

Lady Hermione said...

One thought in my sleeping pill addled mind was "Danger WIll Robinson, Danger!" That could have helped! LOL!

SpooWriter said...

The "Error! Error! Error!" is from some sci-fi robot, but I don't think it was the Lost in Space Robot.

As soon as I post this comment, I'll remember which one it was.

I'm thinking Nomad from the original Star Trek, but I'm not sure.