Rant #1,622: Powerless

Last night, I came home from work, ate dinner, and figured I was in for a light night after having a few busy nights trying to get my iMac in shape.

I worked on the computer after I ate, and it seems palatable, but still a little foreign to me.

But again, I believe in computer diversity--or at least I am being forced to now by the cirsumstances--so it is Mac all the way after nearly two decades with a PC.

Whatever the case, at about 7:00 p.m. or so, the lights began to flicker in the house--and I mean every light, on top to bottom.

I had never experienced such a thing happening, and it had me worried.

Nothing else in the house that was running on electricity seemed to be affected, but I knew that the lights flickering was a warning, of sorts, and something I should check up on.

In this Internet age that we live in, I simply went onto my tablet computer, looked up "flickering lights in the house" or something to that degree, and found that it could be a warning for an impending electrical fire.

I kind of panicked, but then, almost instantaneously after I found out this information, the flickering stopped at about 8 p.m.

I started to watch WWE wrestling with my son--NXT, from my phone to a TV we have in my daughter's former bedroom--and everything seemed to be hunky dory.

My son, who I must give credit as the person who noticed the flickering first, questioned what had happened, and we thought it might have been a power surge, because that can cause flickering lights too.

But then at about 8:30 p.m. or so, we heard a "pop" and we lost all the electricity in the house.

We also noticed that a truck with workmen was across the street, busily working on something.

We heard some more pops, but this looked like a night without electricity for us.

My wife and son chagrined, "What am I going to do?" as we sat in the pitch black dark.

Me, I figured that this was God's warning that it was time to go to sleep, and I went into the bed and closed my eyes, knowing that there was no way I was going to doze off without any power.

My wife took out her tablet and occupied herself. I have no idea what my son was doing to occupy his time.

I guess reading by candlelight was not an option.

Anyway, at about 9:15 p.m. or so, after my wife had decided she had had enough and joined me in the slumber that never came to me, the power exploded back on.

It is my job to reset everything, and get everything in running order, which I did, but it is never an easy job.

I had to reset the TVs, I had to reset the VCRs and DVDs--yes, no DVR for us, we are really old fashioned, aren't we?--and I had to set the times on various appliances and clocks.

It probably took about 15 minutes to do everything, but at about 9:30 p.m. or so, we were operational again.

And there was one benefit to the whole mess--a disk that was stuck in our VCR/DVD recorder for about the past two weeks popped out as easily as it went in. I could not get this thing out for the life of me, and now it came out, as they say, "like butta."

So I sat down, watched the end of the replay of the Yankees' first 2016 spring training game, and went to sleep, knowing that we had power.

It is just another day in paradise, a day I will soon forget, but if nothing else, I got that pesky disk out.

Now for the real challenges of another day.