blackout

Our office building suffered a brief flicker of a power outage—enough to stop me in my tracks with the project I'd been working on. When the power came back on, some of my work had been undone. Luckily, I'd been working on a Google Doc, which saves your work every few seconds (and when it's really peppy, at almost every keystroke), so I lost at most a few mere sentences. I can retype those tomorrow.

Alas, the power went off a second time, and this time around, it seemed to be a knockout punch for my office. Within a few minutes, power had come back on for the other half of our floor: the fourth floor is fairly equally divided between classrooms, on one side, and offices on the other. The classroom side of our floor had its lights back on, but our offices were, for whatever reason, down for the count except, bizarrely, for a narrow strip of hallway lighting. About thirty of us workers milled about, unsure what to do. After enough time had passed, it became obvious that restoring power to our particular section of the floor was going to take a while, so we all decided, en masse, that the time had come to call it a day. I ended up leaving at about the time I would have left had there been no power outage.

The rest of our part of town had power. The outage was so strangely localized to our floor, and to my section of the floor, that the loss of power had the feeling of something aimed especially at me. Since the outage failed to cut my work day short, though, I lump this event in with Alanis's "death-row pardon, two minutes too late."

PS: the subway was fine, and my gigantic apartment building is, unsurprisingly, unaffected.

PPS: this is not Typhoon Cimaron. That typhoon floats over Japan in a day or so, and it'll miss Korea, except maybe for its wispy western edge.