Jackie Wells-Fauth
As I have said, I love history. In fact, I love it so much that it was my major in college. I would have been perfectly happy teaching history, but English intervened and so history became my hobby instead. And I have always had the idea that I would fit right in with those hardy souls in previous centuries.
I nurse this fantasy all the time. Imagine, wearing the colorful costumes and riding horses and having all of those fun adventures! This fantasy, however, does not hold up against the harsh reality contained in the question of power.
I don’t mean political or social power, although the more of that you have, the better you are going to live. No, I mean energy, that which it takes to run my household appliances. I want to live in the good old days, but I don’t want to be the automatic dishwasher!
This fantasy about the past hit a brick wall this morning when suddenly, right in the middle of one of my favorite television re-runs, the television died. At first, I thought it was the television that was taking a permanent break. But then I noticed that the radio was dark and when I flipped on a light to check the time, there was no light.
Usually these outages are very short-lived, but the people at the electric company were having a very bad start to their day, because I waited in vain for quite some time. Still no juice to the lights and television. A call to the power company assured us they were aware of the problem, and they were working on it, but they couldn’t tell us when we would be back in the century of electric power.
No problem. These things happen. I would just go out and make my morning coffee. Except the grinder for my coffee beans is electric and even if I could have ground the coffee, the coffeemaker is electric. There was no need to panic, though, I would just put on the kettle and have tea instead. I am nothing if not adaptable.
Of course, the tea kettle sat on the stove like a cold, dead fish while I reached for the controls and realized that the stove was also electric. Okay, so water it is…except the water and the ice are in the refrigerator and as soon as I opened the door and looked at the dark interior, I immediately slammed it shut—need to save the cool, right?
Now, things were getting serious. What did those people in the “good old days” do without their power? Well, they never had it in the first place, so they didn’t worry about it. Maybe that’s what I should do, I thought; just build a survivalist hut and live without power. Then I laughed; this is me we are talking about. I need my flushing toilet and electric lights!
I decided to make use of the battery charged items. I flipped on my laptop because it has several hours of battery power. I’ll just check to see if anyone else is out of power. The first message to come up? Due to lack of power, you do not have Wi-Fi. Darn!
Things were getting desperate now. I sent my Roomba vacuum out to do the floors, just so I could see something that was powered to do its job. But when the time came to send it back to its base? It informed me in its robot voice that it was “unable to detect charging base.” It sat in the middle of the floor looking as lost as I felt.
So, no laundry (okay, I wasn’t too upset about that), no cooked eggs, no smoothie out of my electric blender and no non-stop re-runs of Midsomer Murders, Outlander, Eureka, etc. What to do with my days? What did all of those people in history do? Well, according to my notes, many of them died long before my age due to lack of proper hygiene and medicine and a few of them died in a shoot-out at the OK Corral—but that’s probably a different kind of power.
I was beginning to get a little panicky, with all these options to entertain myself blocked by a lack of power, when all of a sudden, it came back on. Thank you, power company for being efficient.
And as for those good old days of history, it’s during these powerless moments in time, that I decide that rather than living those days, I’ll just study them…over my second cup of coffee from my electric coffee maker! Power to the people!
dropsinthewell 