Lights Out

Today at work the weirdest thing happened. (for those of you more up to date on my personal life, no, it was not the incident involving me falling down in the middle of the cafeteria at breakfast or me being asked out by the beady-eyed 30-something who runs the security desk and me promptly rejecting… ) It happened just a few hours ago. I was diligently working on.. oh who am I kidding, I was reading Eonline.com’s fascinating article about Lindsay Lohan’s recent break-up and the massive, world-wide repercussions it might have, and right when I was scrolling past the picture of her and saying to myself “I SO do not look like her!” all of the lights in the building went out. I immediately freaked out, but I seemed to be the only one. I started hopping around in my cubicle going “Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!” while all I heard from my co-workers was the subtle clicking of mice and shuffling of papers.

I started to think I was missing something, which is often the case in this office. Then I noticed I had a new email, and as I opened it to see if it said the world was ending and this was why we had a power cut, I realized, “wait.. how can I be on my computer if there was a power cut?” So the email was from Joe McNobody from the maintenance department saying that some generator in Nowheresville, Mexico had happily decided it had had enough of it’s work day, and for no apparent reason had shut itself off. So the whole county had been told to conserve energy.. and being the energy company, we were the first to comply. Ironic? I’m now sitting here in the dark looking at bank accounts for electric companies. This is too weird.

And I later found we were really the only ones in the whole county who actual conserved any energy. I think all the other tall buildings down here in downtown were pointing and laughing at our dark building and the fact that we actually took there conservation warning seriously, saying things like “the ENERGY company is dark! Haha!”

So apparently all of my co-workers had read this email a few minutes earlier and were completely prepared. They acted like this happens every day, whereas I thought it was Armageddon. I can’t believe they’re actually making us work in the dark, so I’ve decided not to. If anyone says anything I’ll be like, hello? It’s dark! But now I think it’s kinda cool being in an office in the dark. Power cuts are kinda fun, and voluntary ones are even funner! The lights have now been out for two whole days! People get kinda weird in the dark though… I just overheard my old-lady co-worker break into a verse of “Strangers in the Night.”

The only annoying thing is that our company also felt that having 8 elevators was just too damned efficient and helpful, so they decided to cut that number in half to conserve more of this energy stuff. So about a thousand people end up loitering in the lobby around 7:59 every morning, waiting for the one elevator that actually seems to work to come down from the executive floor, where it is inevitably being used to deliver eggs benedict to our CEO to eat in his well-lit office.

It was getting pretty testy down there in the lobby… Our building has some underground parking, so you can go either up or down from the lobby. Often an elevator will appear that’s only going down.. and there’s a rather difficult process involving looking at the lighted arrow outside the elevator to see if this is the case. Apparently, working in the dark has made certain people in the office go completely insane, because one of these elevators appeared this morning, and about 20 of the massive crush of people waiting for an “up” elevator got into the down one! It was the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while… all these seemingly intelligent people press the buttons for all their floors, and then, since no one pressed any for below the lobby, the elevator just sat there. I couldn’t help but laugh at them.. they all stood there, clutching their briefcases and staring up at the floor ticker above the door (the usual elevator stance) only the doors didn’t close and it didn’t move. So instead, the whole lobby got a nice show and a quick lesson in “who in the office gets really dumb in a crisis,” They eventually all got out one by one and went to the back of the line in shame.

The only great thing that happened because of the lights being out (besides the many watts of electivity that we probably saved, which may have kept a few poor families from freezing to death at night .. whatever) is that I got to go home early! At like 3:45 the sun started setting and my boss came by and said, “you can go home.. it’s too dark.” I was so excited! So I beat all the traffic and got home super early, which left me plenty of time to try and figure out how I could tamper with more generators and keep the lights in our office off for good.