without power

It was Monday. Go figure. Everything bad happens on Mondays. I no more than stepped in the office door and saw the lights flicker, fade and finally fizzle out.
The entire office came to a screeching halt. I imagine, for many businesses the power outage was crippling to a certain degree. For us at the newspaper, it was debilitating.
We had no computers. No phones. Nearly our whole office runs almost solely on one, or both of those two machines.
With no computer, I couldn’t work on any of my articles for Wednesdays paper. I couldn’t look over any of the other items due that day. I couldn’t check my e-mail or gain access to our server, which is basically the life blood of our office.
Without a phone I couldn’t call my contacts for the articles I was working on or set up interviews.
Life had just... stopped.
For a little while, everyone in our office was light hearted. We were joking about playing a game of cards or calling it quits for the day.
I read all six of the newspapers from the area we receive each day. I chatted with everyone in the office. I organized my desk.
After forty-five minutes, the atmosphere had changed. People started getting nervous. Without computers we had no way to finish our work to make deadline that afternoon. We couldn’t digitally send things to the Spencer office, where the paper is printed.
We started brainstorming options. Some could head to the Spencer office and work there for the day, but they didn’t really have computers to spare. After all, they had a paper to put out as well.
Even if we found other computers to work on, the outage had frozen our use of the server. Everything on it was unavailable to us and couldn’t be retrieved by another computer.
It’s amazing how much we take for granted. We think of technology as a staple, not a convenience. It’s always there. Only when it’s unusable to we realize to what extend it drives our lives.
Just seconds before panic set in, the lights sputtered, the server started clicking again and the furnace roared once more.
God bless those people at the electric company, as our technological, convenience driven lives moves on.

To be printed in the DCN 1-11.