Spending an hour in the dark

Power outages, like the one we had yesterday, can be inconvenient, but they have a certain element of fun to them, too.

First, there’s the “down tools” aspect of it, in which everyone has a reason to lift nose from the grindstone and spend some time standing around talking about it. “Oh, great!” is an appropriate comment, as in, “Well, how am I supposed to get my work done now! I guess we’ll all just have to stand around talking about how we can’t get any work done!”

In our building, no lights means darkness unless you want to crowd around the windows that look out onto Seymour Street and Fourth Avenue. Being designed as a department store, it has a lot of space without much natural light.

My own office is up against the back wall about as far from those windows as possible. Someone with either a sense of pity, or as a practical joke, built my office with a window, from which I can look out into the newsroom and, if I crane my neck, see a sliver of light from way across the floor. But when Hydro goes out, it becomes good natural habitat for bats — impossible to work in.

The biggest cause for concern, though, was that for the hour it lasted in this part of town, the outage made it impossible to take care of nature’s calls, since the washrooms were in total blackness. Everyone made it through, to my knowledge, but there was a race to the biffies as soon as the lights came back on.

Must say it was pleasant to get a live voice on the B.C. Hydro power-outage line (via cellphone, of course, since our lines were down). Usually, you get the recording, but this time I actually got to have a conversation with a very helpful Hydro employee who explained the situation and estimated we’d be in the dark until 1 p.m. An hour before that, the lights came back on.