Imagine for a moment, it's roughly 4:15pm on Thursday, August 14th. You’re sitting at your desk in a busy, bustling office (with no windows) and suddenly… darkness. Many of you are probably nodding your heads right now, thinking "yeah that was me."

It was me too. Sitting at my day job, finishing up one task, preparing to boot the software to begin another, thinking of all the writing, emailing, etc that needed to be done that evening, when in a sudden heaving sigh… darkness.

Power failure. Shit.
Plant-wide power failure. Double shit.

Does this mean I am going to get to go home early? :)

I walk out the front doors of the office (nothing else I can do) and I see other dazed people walking out of the buildings surrounding us. I walk back inside and proclaim, "I don't think it’s just us." I sit back down at my desk, reach for the phone and call my boyfriend. He doesn’t pick up at home or on his cell. I leave a message. I call my parents next, they tell me that their power is out too (they living in a neighbouring city), mid-conversation the phone lines go dead. This is around the time that I begin to realize that this isn't going to be one of those "just flick the switch back on" solutions. Shit again.

Then there's that other slowly dawning realization...
I work a one-hour subway / RT ride from where I live. No electricity means no train. Triple shit. If being a public transit commuter doesn’t already suck (and you know it does), that right there brought the suck up to eleven and broke the meter.

Payday is uselessly, of course, the next day, so I am flat busted. I have $3.06 cents in cash on me. If we still had a working suck meter it would be skyrocketing exponentially at this point.

I’m stuck. Firmly stuck. So I do the only thing that no electricity, no phone service, and $3.06 cents in my pocket allows me to do. I walk...
I get two blocks and watch a car, already engulfed in flames, explode in a raging fireball. I turn to the guy walking on the sidewalk near me, "sort of feels like the end of the world, doesn't it?" He ignores me. I walk another block.

Minutes later, some construction dudes in a cube van yell out some lewd comments at me and try to get a date. Ugh. It's going to be a long walk.

I get to the RT station thinking I could slip inside for a moment, view the city-wide transit map and make a getting home game plan, since I don’t really know the Northeast side of the city at all, but the place is locked down tighter than a coastal town during a hurricane. Shit! is quickly turning to Fuck! at this point. I walk on... for like 45
minutes...

Then I see a bus... (seeing a bus after walking in the sweltering heat in office clothes is like seeing an Oasis in the desert, WOW!) The bus stops about 40 meters away and I make a break for it. It’s jammed with humans sardine can tight and not air-conditioned in the least, but who cares, it's a bus, it's going West and it travels much quicker than my two feet even without the help of working traffic lights. I thank the public transit gods, try not to inhale to much BO and listen to the only CD I brought with me on my walkman (Modest Mouse’s "The Moon & Antartica", if you are interested.) I start to think there may be a light (candlelight?) at the end of this tunnel.

I probably would not have been that optimistic had I known the disaster that was waiting for me at the top of Yonge St.

Yonge St. (the world’s longest street) is pandemonium. The sidewalks are crowded with people desperate to go south and while, yes, buses do creep every few minutes despite the gridlock, they either change lanes before reaching the mob or are so crowded that they can only take at most three or four more people on and those people are practically falling out the doors. There is no order to the sidewalk mob, a bus stops and opens its doors and instantly it is besieged by frustrated, pushing people.

Since I suffer from intense claustrophobia when confined in tight spaces with lots of people. I realize that once again I am right fucked (this is the running theme of the day at this point), even if there was some way I could make it onto one of those buses, there is no way I could take the over an hour journey downtown without blacking out on one. I watch the buses go by for another hour. It doesn’t get more promising. I am also starting to understand everyone’s frustration, I am starting to get mad, real mad. Mostly at the TTC for being such dumb asses. Because wouldn’t it make much more sense to dispatch empty buses to each of the Northern transfer points, instead of starting ALL of them at the North-most station, then other people further along the line would actually have some chance in hell of getting on one. This only confirms what I already believed, the TTC is absolutely incapable of thinking without its head up its ass (more to come on that in a future column.)

It’s now well over two hours since I left the office. I have been in the hot sun for almost as long and I am starting to feel the first signs of an impending migraine are taking root. Shit. Never mind the East Coast-wide blackout, a body-wide blackout is going to be impending if I don't get out of the sun and into some food, water and cool dark space soon. Stupid migraines.

I start walking. Pure desperation now. I know it is about 3 hours on foot to home but with the rising migraine, I start to fear that’s my only option left.

As I put one heavy foot in front of the other, I watch the happy people strolling North, laughing and enjoying their new electricity-free world and seethe. No one cares that I am far from home, stranded and getting sick. I doubt that even the bus drivers of those over-packed buses would care. I check my cell phone. I have one "tick" of power left. I don't call anyone. If things get real bleak, I am going to need that one "tick" bad.

I continue to walk. Try to forget the hungry, thirsty, migraine coming on bad now... just walk and watch...

Watch all those cars creep by with just ONE person in them. All those empty seats that could help people get safely home or at least give them a lift as far as they are going. I watch all those selfish people drive by who have such great miraculous power in their hands to save someone’s day, to do a kind deed and selfishly don't even think to bother. Seethe, seethe, seethe... and I want to scream at the drivers in the passing cars. Toronto the kind is not really Toronto the kind, not like we like to think, but just another city on earth. I hear people talking about gas stations jacking prices up almost twice as much as usual, selling essentials for three times what they are worth. Seethe, seethe, seethe...
anything for a buck, even at the expense of the desperate and needy.

Then a good deed, a miraculous deed happens to me, a woman pulls up in her car and shouts "anyone need a ride downtown?" At that moment, she is my guardian angel. The car fills up with previously walking women, all a long way from their homes downtown. And I feel saved. If I had any money in my pocket I would have given it to her, because here is a women who is doing that one thing that I was thinking everyone should be. She is indeed a miracle. She is my renewed faith in my city.

I get home safe but sick, 4 1/2 hours after leaving my office. I spend the next two days in bed suffering from one of the worst migraines I have ever had – the local pharmacy that has my prescription on file has no power and is closed, I get no easy relief

I spend a lot of time thinking about how I don't have the same rosy view of the citizens of this city as I used to, but how I believe in human angels more now than ever before.

I told Jenny (the kind lady driving the car) that if she emailed me her address I would send her a free copy of the book I co-wrote. I never heard from her. I don't know if she truly has any idea the difference she made in my life that day, but thank you Jenny, you did.

And TTC, damn you for not having an emergency plan in place that actually works.

Oh and, I think this all taught us not to take electricity for granted because it sure is bloody nice.

This article brought to you by a wall plug, an iBook and girl who had a really long mid-August journey home.

monica s. kuebler

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