| On Christmas of 2003, my sister and her family came over. We had started cooking a turkey in the oven for Christmas Dinner. If you remember, that Christmas had really bad weather. It was raining and the wind was blowing hard all day.
At about 1:30PM, the lights go out. Just poof, and everything shuts off. I waited about 5 minutes hoping they'd come back on, but they didn't. I called Edison, and told them we had no electricity. The operator wanted me to go outside and make sure that we didn't trip a circuit breaker. Well, there was NO WAY I was going outside in the rain, and stand in a puddle, while playing with something electrical! So, I just put the phone down for a couple of minutes, came back and said "they're fine". She said they'd have to call a repairman out.
An hour turned into two, which turned into three. Our turkey was only a quarter done when the lights went out-and our oven is electric! More time passed. I noticed that our WHOLE STREET BLOCK didn't have electricity. I made several calls to Edison, who always said "they have someone on the way". Even more time passed. We decided to eat whatever was available, since now it was around 7:00PM. For Christmas "dinner", we had cold lasagna by candelight! By now everyone was pretty grumpy, since there's nothing really to do without electricity.
My sister finally left at around 9:00 PM. We still had no lights. I made one final call to Edison, and they said they had a bunch of power outages in the area, and to be patient. We decided to go to bed, since there was no point in waiting any longer.
FINALLY, at 1:30 AM on Dec. 26th, we had power back on! Unfortunately, the turkey was ruined, so we had to get a new one. |