Left In The Dark

    It's New Year's Day, Sunday January 1st, 2006. A little before 6:30 pm i am sitting at my computer doing uh...... computer stuff and Mike is in the living room watching football. Mike is from Texas and his team, the Dallas
Cowboys,stylishplus, is playing the St. Louis Rams. All of a sudden, blink, the screen goes dark and the lights go out. From the living room I hear a string of obscenities. Mike's an avid football fan and he doesn't like interruptions, especiaUy when his team is playing. A storm here had caused the power outage, or so we thought.
    A couple hours later we hear the sound of large trucks outside. It's the power company and they can't find the source of the outage because it also took out their display grid in the control room. So they are manual1y checking power poles. i looked out the back door and saw what appeared to be a downed power line. i showed Mike and he said we should tell the power company workers about it. We went out front and brought one of the workers through the house and showed him. He went running back out front and the crew got in the truck and sped off.
    After a bit the crew returned and the one we showed the power line to came up
and told us it was an optica1 illusion. From the angle we had out the back door the line appeared to have fallen, but from another angle it was ok. Aw rats, we thought we had saved the day: i said to Mike that things could have been worse. "How is that?" he asked. i said, "This cou1d be August instead of January and it would be one hundred and ten degrees out with no air conditioning." It was an optimistic view in an unfortunate situation. Mike thought about this for a second and then shook his head and went, "Naahhhhhhhhhh! and walked away. Mike's not one to try and see the good side of things. Oh well, too dark to do anything and no battery operated radio to listen to, so it was off to bed.
    There was no power all through the next day. In fact it wasn't restored till a little after 9:00 am on Tuesday morning, just over thirty eight and a half hours later. i rebooted my computer and got online. Des had the day off and saw me come online and wondered what i had been up to since she hadn't seen me for a couple days. i told her there had been a power outage here and we had no electricity. Then as i was looking at the screen, i couldn't believe the words i was reading. Des had typed, "So has your power come back on yet? Uh. . . . . .let me guess,Des is blonde? Hey now,no blonde jokes. i typed back to Des, "Uh.......duhhhhhhhhh." She started laughing and said after she saw it that she couldn't believe she had typed it herself. i just laughed and told her I'd
talk to her later. By the way, yep, Des is blonde. I knew it! Oh shut up!
    Any way， we found out the storm isn't what had caused the power outage, failing equipment in a substation on the outskirts of town had been the culprit. Oh well, if this was the worst that was going to happen, then it wouldn't be such a bad year. All of a sudden there's another string ofobscenities pouüng out from .Mike in the living room. He had got online and was checking scores，the Rams had beaten the Cowboys. i chuckled, but to myself, Mike was mad enough already: If this was a sign of things to come， Mike wasn't going to have a very good year. yep, you could say he was off to a rocky start. For once i'11 agree with you.