Friday 7 July 2006

Pic of the day: Am I some sort of supernatural character, since I have the power to cause random blackouts? No, luckily this is my City of Heroes character, The Ancient Forestal.

The power and my glory

On Friday, late in the evening (around 22, or 10 PM) I was peacefully playing on my computers when the power suddenly switched off. It switched back on almost immediately, then off. I turned off the power so they don't restart all the time, but then it stayed off for some minutes. I turned on my living room computer and began to write. The power blacked out again.

Fine, I can be patient when needed. Especially since I have almost not played Animal Crossing on my Nintendo DS for weeks. So I played from 22:19 to 22:56 approximately. (Tom Nook's shop closes at 23.) The power had come back in the beginning of this period. I turned on the living room computer again and recovered documents that had been damaged last time. The power went out again.

Coincidence, huh? With power outages there is not any chance that I can use subconscious input to guess when they will happen, as I might with thunder or hail. I have mentioned in the past how thunderstorms tend to show up when I am particularly emotional, and how I for a while believed that this must be because I have some supernatural effect on the weather. But I kinda scrapped that and landed on a theory that my rare moods were caused by the atmospheric conditions rather than the other way around. Thunderclouds are pretty big things to create at a whim. Well, I am starting to wonder now.

The requirement for any scientific theory is that it has predictive power. So I thought to myself: If I really am such an important person that my most trivial decisions count for more than the convenience of hundreds of innocent neighbors (the whole neighborhood went dark, you see) then I should be able to do it again. So I waited a random number of minutes, shorter than the last time, and fired up another computer. When it had finished booting and was ready to use, the power blacked out again. This time I gave up, and the power did not come back either, until the next morning.

Incidentally, that the power came back was probably even more of a miracle. The electricians at the utility company are on strike, so I have no idea who fixed it. I will probably never know.