I love my wife with all my heart and soul, but if we go without power for more than a day or two, we're headed to the nearest hotel fairly quickly. I can entertain all the Les Stroud fantasies I want, but she's going to be standing behind me shaking her head mumbling what a dumbass I'm being. From her perspective, no work + no heat = WTF am I doing here? If she can get a flight to New Orleans, she will be there quicker than I can say don't take the last pack of smokes.
This is what I'm talking about. I'm talking about maybe 3-4 days, or a week or two max. The fact that somebody couldn't figure out the red toggle hanging from the garage door chain disengages the door from the chain to open it manually. Or eating cold sandwiches by candlelight when there's a gas stove outside the person could use to cook with. Regardless of how much storage you may or may not have, I bet you all have at least one or two cans of something that's heat & eat in your kitchen. Put it in a pan and hold it over the candle for about 10-15 minutes and it's at least warm. You don't have to grow up hunting and camping or even have a passing interest in them to figure out those kinds of problems.
Re: I Got The Power Heh. I grew up in a working poor environment and so I learned how to fix stuff like how to change a fuse or flip a circuit breaker. Now we live in a nice enough neighborhood. Only myself and one neighbor wash our own cars and he's a renter and therefor deemed unworthy. One guy who walked by as I was doing the brakes on one of the cars broadly hinted I must not be doing well financially. It never occurred to him I might actually enjoy working on cars and might even know more than the local JiffyLube trainee. Ain't suburbia grand?
Re: I Got The Power And I can't be the only that snuck the car out of the garage like that when I was in high school?
Maybe it's just me but doesn't it always seem like when we talk about stuff like surviving a power outage suddenly everyone begins hinting at prepping? Also, I never got the idea of anyone who is unable to quickly check something out, like say, a garage door, pull the red string and yank it up and step out. Or flipping breakers for that matter. Maybe it's because I was an electrical apprentice, but that just seems basic and relatively easy stuff to do. Like, when your power goes out, you assess via flashlight if the breakers flipped or something, and call the power company politely, hear them out and then just figure out how you're going to entertain yourself for the next couple of hours/days.
My power was inexplicably out last week and I couldn't get the garage open. Seriously I pulled the red string to disengage, I pulled open, it went up about an inch and stopped because it hit some sort of resistance. I had to wait for the power to come back on to leave the house. And, yes, I know it was disengaged from the opener because i had to reattach it to open the garage. In other news, I'm a goner if this happens for more than a few hours.
Well, we're talking about a week here. I know how to open a garage door manually because my parents are cheap as fuck and wouldn't replace their opener during the winter so I had to open the door for them every single time for a summer. And when I say fucked, I don't mean literally dying, I mean figuratively. I'm so used to 90% of my entertainment and joy coming from things powered by electricity I'd go nuts.
Quick question - why is everyone so jonesed to get their garage door open? Don't you all have front doors? About 10 years ago, our neighbour got home and her garage door opener wouldn't work, so she went next door to the old guy who lived there and asked if he could give her a hand because she "couldn't get into the house". He came over 5 minutes later with a baseball bat and, before she could protest, bashed in her kitchen window and proudly announced "Now you can get in". Never mind that she was clearly holding her house keys in her hand. In fairness, she should have been more clear about her dilemma, but it caused some tension in the neighbourhood after that happened.
So the preppy white girl version of "literally dying." Yeah I agree with you. Although I enjoy the quiet of the power being out, when its out for too long, I cant even. But yeah, you never know what you miss until its gone. Keeping a phone charged was a task all by itself.
You'd be surprised how many people with land lines don't have a normal phone to use in case their wireless phones (and their powered base stations) stop working. $8 at Radio Shack and you're good to go.
Geeze guys. Pussification of American up in here and all that. I am fine-to-genuinely-enjoying situations like these for the first few days, and then start to get spiritually itchy starting at a week or so. I have a lot of hobbies and interests that don't involve electricity, can spend time by myself for a while if needed, and am apparently much more handy and resourceful than the average bear. Like others have mentioned, the last time I was in this type of scenario was Sandy. People were going out of their minds before the day was even over and it was driving me nuts. I understand there are different mindsets and personality types and the introvert v. extrovert thing and all that, but Jesus some people seemed almost afraid to just sit in their apartment for a day, let alone by the end of whole ordeal. (To be clear: I'm talking about the people who got stuck from the subways shutting down or had their power go out, not the people who had their homes destroyed. They were allowed to complain.) One thing I did learn for preparing in the future, though, is next time there's even a hint of something like that happening again I'm taking out a whole bunch of money. It never crossed my mind that the card machines would all die and a lot of ATMs did too and then the ones that were still working got cleaned out of money pretty quickly, so that was the one thing where I was starting to feel helpless.
No public transportation, friends are all working, and I'd rather figure out how to open the door than pay $20 for a cab
Most of my hurricane experience was spent working so we didn't really have time to process the fact that the power was out. However, my folks have gone through enough long- term power outages that they bought a decent generator to keep the fridge and freezers cold as well as power some basic appliances. The OL and I spent three days without power due to an ice storm and we got by on a gas fireplace, gas stove, lanterns and books. Really, it wasn't all that bad since we could take hot showers and such. She wasn't all that into banging, which is kind of fucked up because you literally have no idea what's going on in the outside world so sex. The neighbors, however... College aged guys at an expensive private college. We hear a car outside giving it hell trying to climb up the driveway. Three or four of them are pushing the car and its sliding all over the place. They finally give up and the car limps away. The following day, the dog is steady eating something in the street. I ran over there to find about 40 lbs of cat food in the road. Not cat litter. Cat food. They do not have a cat, so I assume one of them bought it specifically for this occasion. Oh well. They were close!
I mean, I'm not saying I haven't ever driven my truck into the garage door. But, yeah, opening the garage door is easier than driving my truck through the den.
My bad. I was working on the assumption that we were talking about some sort of major event where a power outage would take out an entire city. If that's the case, I know I am not an essential service so I would park my ass at home unless otherwise required. I'm not keen on sitting at work in the dark. Besides - we're on a fob system so I doubt our doors would even open.
I've hobby picked and circumvented locks for years, and have a nice wrecking bar for door related emergencies, and I live in a place where winter gets cold enough to maybe need an extra blanket. For humans, the only real animal related dangers here are sharks if you go looking for trouble, or if we were tLking long term collapse, maybe wild dogs and pigs. People here don't have guns, I'm walking distance from two of the biggest hospitals in the state, my girlfriend is an ambo and my housemate is a volunteer firefighter and surf life saver. If it was an emergency, I'd end up volunteering with one of them. If it was just a power outage? I can battery pack entertain myself for a day or two, and read books for a week or two. I've also got a bunch of leather making stuff I could use to keep busy. I have good flashlights and spare batteries for a while and some gas powered camping lanterns. Our only big problem is that nobody keeps food or cash around. For survival calories I could do a week or so but it wouldn't be good. My roommate might have a few days, but I'd have to end up sharing. We have a nice bbq and charcoal spit roast, but after that, it's a question of time before we break put the fishing gear, or start snaring possums or cats for food. That said, g20 is coming up, we're getting the fuck out of dodge for that. House sitting for a friend out of town and hoping my place survives.