Wednesday, August 5, 2020

You don't have the power

This morning I went to the laundromat and, despite the fact that this was most definitely within their hours of operation, they were closed. On the way I passed several traffic lights that were out, on foot and on the bus, but I when I got to the laundry I still didn't put it together. My first priority was finding another place to do the wash. After this was done I returned to the same neighborhood to wait for the bus home. That's when I saw the sign in an Asian restaurant door saying they were closed due to a power failure. Apparently this was quite widespread. Caused by a storm that happened yesterday. I lost power myself yesterday for like, a second, but otherwise was unaffected. So while the whole thing caused problems for me, I was quite lucky in another way.

2 comments:

susan said...

I can see how you might not notice a power outage in the middle of a summer's day particularly if everything was normal at home. So far around here we've never had one but outages, sometimes lengthy ones, happened in Halifax with some frequency. The odd thing was that the electricity never went off during bad weather but always on what appeared to be an ordinary day.

Last winter the landlords shut down our laundry room for more than a week making it necessary for us to find a laudromat - businesses that are almost as rare as phone booths these days at least on the west coast. When we went to the one a few blocks away that we'd noticed in passing it turned out to not have been updated since about 1973. Not only were the washers old and clunky but when Jer put money in one of the dryers that wouldn't work at all he told the woman in the dry cleaners next door and she came over with her special tool - a bent coat hanger. We found a decent laundromat that was a few miles away after that.

Ben said...

It is a bit weird that you lost power on nicer days in Halifax. Maybe that's when they figured it was safe to take the grid down for maintenance? But yeah, in the morning or early afternoon it's kind of tough to put it together. A power failure at night is much more noticeable, a little scary, maybe a bit exciting as well.

You must have been relieved to get your building's laundry room back. The only time I've been able to use a laundry room as such was when I was living in the dorms at college. A lot of residential buildings here don't have them. My usual place isn't so bad, although the cooler people who I used to see working there have either left or maybe they've just been furloughed. We'll see.