Who would have thought electricity was essential?! *sighs*

[wagegoth]

A few years ago, the power was wiped out to a good chunk of the peninsula when a small plane crashed into a tower. Power was out for hours. We got to work, and they finally just told us to go home, because the doors require keycards, including the doors to the restrooms. Traffic was snarled for miles and miles with street lights out.

A restaurant I frequented let me use their restroom; they had generators that were keeping stuff running, including the lights at a low level. And then I went out to wait for a couple of hours for a bus to get through the traffic to take me home.

[fireheart]

Loss of electricity makes people just lose their minds.

I have yet to check work (childcare)'s policy on this, but what I do know is that in the event that the water is turned off for whatever reason, we're actually meant to send the kids home .

[Jetfire]

Upriver, the spring flooding has started and it flooded the pumping station of my hometown. Since there was a boil order in effect, the schools had to be shut down for the day. (The day after was a PD day, and after that was Good Friday/ Easter Monday. So 6 day weekend for the kids. )

Long long ago, when I worked retail, our policy was as others said. No power, shut the store down, escort everyone out.

[TimmyHate]

You can actually get the loss covered on your homeowner insurance if it happens at home. However, you have to document everything that was in your freezer. The loss usually isn't enough to cover the deductible, and so it's generally not worth it.

In Kiwiland, we regularly (I'd say 10-20 a week in my team) get claims where people have, and I'm not shittin you, over $2000 worth of meat in their chest freezers. About half of the time its 'Home Kill', the rest of the time they just stock up when the supermarket/butchers have a sale

[DeltaSierra]

I worked for a place that had a VERY tempermental computer system, and if it was shut down improperly, it would reboot half-assed, and need a full shutdown and reboot again in order to get the registers to work. This took 15-20 min easily.

After a power failure one afternoon (we'd emptied the store and closed the doors while waiting for power to return) once power came back on, all the customers who had been loitering outside made a mad dash for the doors, and were angry and astounded that they wouldn't be allowed back in that very second to continue shopping. Explaining that the computer system needed rebooting (which also controlled the cameras and anti-theft sensors, but we didn't say this) fell on deaf ears. We actually had to call the cops on these two idiots who thought that they could bash their way through the glass doors with their shopping cart and we'd just sit back and allow it.

[Legacy_of_Torment]

There are no words...this is just...No, nope, I can't

Seriously though, how do these people function? You would have thought they'd have deevolved by now

[Geek King]

In Kiwiland, we regularly (I'd say 10-20 a week in my team) get claims where people have, and I'm not shittin you, over $2000 worth of meat in their chest freezers. About half of the time its 'Home Kill', the rest of the time they just stock up when the supermarket/butchers have a sale

Its not that unusual. When I was younger, my parents would go in with another family to buy a full cow and have it butchered. Properly prepared, and with a good freezer, the meat can last for over a year. It requires a bit of pre-planning to have what you need thawed in time, but it saves a lot of money, long-term.

[Bloodsoul]

If I ever run my own business with an analog telephone line, I'm bringing in my old rotary.

[Argabarga]

Its not that unusual. When I was younger, my parents would go in with another family to buy a full cow and have it butchered. Properly prepared, and with a good freezer, the meat can last for over a year. It requires a bit of pre-planning to have what you need thawed in time, but it saves a lot of money, long-term.

I can vouch for that, took us about a year to eat through that cow we got, and that was only PART of him.

We got a pig done for us once, and it took 2 years to eat all that bacon...... mmmmmmm bacon.

Back in my pharmacy days, we had pretty frequent outages because the circuit we were on was in a very wooded area, and stuff was constantly falling on the lines. Fortunately, we had a backup generator that was reliable and the power was usually back within the hour.

I remember as a kid we got 2 days off from school once because they found the town's water supply had been contaminated by Giardia Lamblia

[Chromatix]

To be fair, it could be said that we are over-dependent on electricity these days. It strikes me as exceedingly odd that a mere power failure is grounds to immediately evacuate a building (that doesn't contain substantial quantities of hazardous materials and is normally accessible to the public).

There are a lot of preserved railways that could probably get away without mains power for a while, since the few things they need electricity for are either optional luxuries, or are light enough to run off battery power for an extended period of time (eg. telegraphy and telephony), or are only required at night (eg. lamps on semaphore signals) - or are supplied by mobile generators under normal circumstances (on-train facilities). All they'd need to continue normal operations is a coherent way of selling tickets - I wonder how many of them have mechanical registers on standby? In any case, there are manual methods of bookkeeping.

Modern railways might be another matter. Electric traction is a major national power consumer, although localised power failures can be worked around by connecting normally-isolated sections together and warning drivers to take it easy. A widespread outage would still require diesel locos to be brought in, or a cancellation of service. Modern signals need their lamps lit full-time, although they tend to have battery backups as a matter of course because they are safety-critical - but even these will go flat eventually.

So while the preserved railway could reasonably expect to continue to operate indefinitely during the daytime, the modern railway might be left helpless after the first few hours, and would be seriously disrupted by even a relatively brief major outage.

[Jay 2K Winger]

To be fair, it could be said that we are over-dependent on electricity these days. It strikes me as exceedingly odd that a mere power failure is grounds to immediately evacuate a building (that doesn't contain substantial quantities of hazardous materials and is normally accessible to the public).

It's a liability issue for the owners of the building. If someone trips and falls in a darkened building, they'll probably sue (or be persuaded to do so) the company.

Likewise, in buildings that contain valuable things (banks, retail stores), without power, theft deterrent alarms and security cameras might also be down, or not operating at full capacity, and thus the company simply evacuates to minimize potential problems.

[NecessaryCatharsis]

Definitely a liability issue. At tim hortons we were allowed to continue selling drive through, although the till wouldn't open so it was cash only, exact change, until we ran out of coffee, but were not allowed to let anyone in, serve anymore people in the lobby or clean or do anything once the customers were let out, in case we couldn't see well enough and hurt ourselves. Annoying when you are trying to get chores done before the next shift shows up, but makes sense from the owners point of view.

[morgana]

Its not that unusual. When I was younger, my parents would go in with another family to buy a full cow and have it butchered.

My folks did this, too. Plus Dad hunted on a regular basis. The freezer the ex and I inherited from Mom & Dad was six feet long, four feet across and almost five feet deep.

[crazylegs]

To be fair, it could be said that we are over-dependent on electricity these days. It strikes me as exceedingly odd that a mere power failure is grounds to immediately evacuate a building (that doesn't contain substantial quantities of hazardous materials and is normally accessible to the public).

A large number of the stores I worked in had no (or extremely small) windows letting in no natural light at all (as does every Ikea in the world. When the power was out it was DARK, even with the emergency evacuation lighting.

[coffee_drinker247]

It's amazing how SCs cannot comprehend loss of power. And some companies won't always let you close in the event of a power outage. I have worked places where we were literally expected to stand there in the dark or work in the dark and manually process credit cards using one of those hand machines where you "stamp" their card onto carbon paper. Ugh. One time this happened and our power went out in the mall, and my DM wouldn't let us close and go home even though other stores in the mall were doing so because customers MIGHT still shop in a power outage. I felt like it was a safety issue to let people in the door with all of our fixtures and stuff even if anyone WERE to be shopping. I was so livid. Of course no one came in and I was just sitting in the dark.

But a few weeks ago, we had a power outage in our store (the place I work now) and had to open an hour late because of it since our registers were totally down. We couldn't even count our drawers or do anything. So finally it all came back on except for our music player which had gotten fried somehow and never came back on. The box itself was messed up so we were without music for about five days until we received a new music player. I about wanted to scream every time an SC was like, "WHY IT SO QUIET IN HERE?! What happened to your MUSIC?!" in annoying sing-songy voice. Not quite the same issue, but still annoying nonetheless. Then I'd explain we had a power outage and our music box was broken so we were waiting for a new one and they couldn't seem to grasp that. Wow, didn't realize that listening to pop and dance music while you are shopping was SO important to an SC. Personally, I would welcome not having annoying music to listen to.