So where was I when it happened?
I was in the middle of the Island, on a diner’s rooftop, working on an exhaust fan. The fan next to me started to hum lower, as if another motor turned on on the same circuit, so I paused to look at it. A freezer compressor about 20 feet away from me turned off and on, and I said to myself, “It would be a strange thing to put both those things on the same circuit.” Then I promptly ignored it and went back to work.
“Hey! Hey, you up there!” I heard below, but ignored it, since no one could actually see me from the ground due to the height of the facade of the building. I continued to work.
“Hey, guy,” I heard in a thick Spanish accent from just behind me. I turned to look, and one of the diner’s cooks had climbed the ladder and was gesturing downwards. “The lights.” Car horns started bleating on Vet’s Highway, below us.
“Huh?” I said and followed the cook back down the ladder. Sure enough all the lights were off inside. The owner of the diner sees me and says, “Hey, what did you do?”
So for about five seconds, I thought I caused the biggest black-out in the Northeast, or at least the diner-in-Islandia black-out. Then I said, “Nothing. I’m not working on the electricity!”
“Oh,” the owner of the diner said, slowly and thoughtfully. “So what happened?” And the rest is all of our collective stories, so you know as much as I do there.
One reply on “The day the lights went out on Lakeland Ave.”
That makes me wonder how many people actually were working on electricity and related technologies at that instant.
Of course, I would guess that such people would probably know that they probably don’t have the ability to knock out an entire block’s power by accident.
Very funny story. Funny for me. And only after you proved your innocense =)