Where were you during the great West Chester Blackout of 2008?

Ok, it started off like any other morning, the desire to get rid of the Diet Pepsi I drank right before I fell asleep the night before is essentially my internal alarm clock, so like every morning, I answered nature's call, came back to the futon, and turned on the TV to flip back and forth between the local channels and CNBC, to see how the market futures were looking to gauge what kind of day I could potentially have. Well, at around 6:00 AM or so, I got my answer, but not from TV. I'm sitting there, when suddenly, a deliberate sounding "Boof" (not boom) reverberated through the apartment, the TV went dark, my 100 Mbps Internet stopped, and the air conditioner, the lovely, lovely air conditioner spooled down like a Pratt and Whitney turbofan and made it's customary death gurgle as the condensed water settled into it's reservoir.

I know I paid my power bill, I'm sure I did!

I peaked my head out of my apartment, and the hallway was brightly lit. Hmmmm, a diesel motor grinding along was the only sound I heard. I went back to my dimly lit apartment as the morning sunlight filtered in giving me enough to work with in order to shower, and when I finished, dressed, and stepped out of my apartment again about 1/2 hour later, I walked around the corner of the hallway where I could peak out onto the crossroads of Gay and High Street. Sure enough, the stoplights were out, and there was already a portable stop sign on the street and people were self managing the intersection as best they could.

Oh well, not much I could do, I'll go to work, I'm sure the power will be back on when I get home from work 11 hours later, right? HA!

I got home, parked the scooter, and with it still being daylight, it was hard to determine if the power was on, but I heard that distinctive growl of that diesel generator, so that didn't bode well. As I turned the corner, through Prescott Alley onto High Street was a fleet of Peco Energy trucks, and a bunch of big men in orange hardhats looking down a hole in the sidewalk.

Damn, power's out, but at least I know I paid my bill...but this looks like it could take a while.

Then there is a note on the door to the entrance of my building. According to the note, the property manager said it's a "Very serious problem....and we just have to make the best of it."

Word on the street from my fellow Greentree denizens was that we were looking at sometime between 2 and 4 AM.

Well, screw that, I'm going to a hotel.

The idea of sitting in a dark apartment, from 8:00 PM until 7:00 AM tomorrow, with no TV, Internet and lovely, lovely air conditioning gave me a sense of absolute dread. So, as we speak, I'm sitting in an Ice Cold room at the Microtel suites on 202 and Matlack Street. I've got cable TV, (Basic cable, but still) and I've got Internet so I can post this blog!

Now I could probably go into a lengthy dissertation about crumbling infrastructure, American demand for more and more power, given that when the power cables were laid around the Greentree Building in 1929 there was no such thing as Air Conditioning, Computers, High Def TV's and etcetera etcetera, but I'll spare everyone my comments on what's obvious. Still, it's 2008, is the price of having the quality of life I have living in a cool downtown area where I can walk to the Dry Cleaner, the drug store, the Post Office, the Barber, the coffee shop and the brewpub, the occasional 24 hour power outage every couple of years?

Yea, I'll pay it...and my power bill......