Black Oak's Daughter

What do a group of 25-30 year olds do when the power that runs everything that their job is dependent on goes out?  It’s kind of interesting to watch. I’m one of the elders on a team of “kids”.

 At my day job we are dependent on technology. Computers and phones, instant messanger, and e-mail.  Very little work happens without them.  These tools, of course are all dependent on electricity. 

When the power went out this afternoon, about 2/3 of the team was instantly computerless, the rest with laptops lasted maybe 30 minutes before the network died.  They went about the same time the phone switch died, so suddenly there was nothing to do.  The building that we’re in also loses water pressure when we lose power, so there was no water, or bathroom facilities. The AC went out too, and my western facing office warmed up nicely, which was good for a while, because it’s usually pretty cold.

I was a psych major. I’m one of those people that takes time at the mall to sit down and watch people.  It’s interesting.  So, watching people in situations where they are suddenly out of their element is absolutely fascinating to me.

I stayed at my desk, and did my filing, and cleaned, and other such things.  While I was making myself busy, I was watching the rest of the team. They took turns gathering at each others cubes.  The smokers all went for a smoke, the sports people talked fantasy football, the complainers complained, and time went by. After a while a few business conversations actually took place, inevitebly ending with “I’ll have to check that when the systems come back up.”

As time went on, the complainers got louder. It was getting stuffy with no air circulation going on, and no bathrooms, well with 100 people in the office, that gets to be a problem after an hour or two.  A couple of people were tossing one of those squishy stress balls back and forth. In our department there are a couple of beach balls for impromptu friday afternoon cube volleyball matches.  A few wandered to other departments.  There were conversations in the hallway, some work related, some not.  I finished what I could at my desk and got up and walked around a bit myself.  The people that had been there for a while and remember when meetings could happen without technology actually got a few things done.  Questions were answered, points discussed. After a time, all that was finished too and everyone was waiting for some kind of news about what happened and whether the executives were making a decision yet or not.

There’s an interesting psychology of people that should be working, that can’t work, that feel like they should pretend to be working, because management is walking around trying to determine how long they can make us work, and wait with no power and no toilets. 

News finally came. Apparently there was a construction mishap and our entire complex had no power.  It happens about once a year. It always takes a few hours to fix. So depending on the time of day, and the nature of the mishap, management makes a decision to keep us there or let us go. 

Today’s incident happened right after lunch. 2-3 hours without power would still mean we had an hour or two left to work, so they took extra long to make the decision. About 3 pm the VP of HR had heard that it would be sometime after 4 before we had power, and since it went out right after 1, he told us to go home. There’s only so long you can hold it, ya know? And usually when our building loses power, we can walk over to the next building and use the bathrooms there. That wouldn’t help today.

The complainers still complained. Some people never change. They essentially got 2 hours off at the end of the day, and they were complaining about taking the stairs down because no one trusted the generator that the elevators run on.  I’m sure tomorrow they’ll complain about something else.  

I took the elevator. The generator has never stopped before during an outage, and quite honestly, I’m going to be spending an hour on my back with my legs in stirrups for a few tests on wednesday and the last thing I need then is leg cramps. I left it to God and took the freight elevator down.

I considered the time off a gift.  I had forgotten to renew my car tags last month and realized over the weekend that they expired in October, not November like I thought. I used the time to run home and get the paperwork, and run to the DMV to get my tags. It took all of 10 minutes there. (Mental note, there’s very little wait at 4 pm at the DMV)  That saved me from a long lunch and a long line. There was no rush to get back. It was peaceful. I was thankful.

All in all, the time off was 90 minutes well spent for me. I got home and took a quick nap before supper.    A low stress day.

I’m sure I’ll pay for it tomorrow with the backlog of work that I’ll need to get through rather quickly, but today was interesting, and kind of fun. People are funny.

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