You might have heard about the wee little blackout we had here in L.A. today, which put about two million people in the dark for about an hour and a half.
I was in Valley Village, and I was fixing a paper jam as we were trying to run off a script when the power went out. At first, I thought I somehow blew a fuse in the copy room, but then I realized the whole building was out.
And the traffic lights down the street were out. And there were people wandering around outside trying to figure out what was going on across the street.
Assorted theories about the cause were batted around the office as the extent of the blackout became clear. A few of them were:
- The Terrorists (with many mocking references to how they “hate our freedom”).
- Some drunken schmuck crashing into a transformer, causing a domino effect of outages [this was my personal theory].
- Some sort of power surge similar to what caused the massive blackout on the east coast in 2003.
- Aliens.
Well, it wouldn’t be Southern California without one supernatural and/or completely implausable explanation.
Three people were stuck in elevators, one for the entire length of the blackout, and two for about 45 minutes.
The latter pair were freed when one of them had to pee very badly, but the former ended up just putting his jacket down on the floor and taking a nap.
Filming actually went on pretty much as planned since the lights were powered by generators anyway, and they ran an extension cord up from one of the gennies to the copier so we could finish running scripts.
Oh, and this (of course) happened the one day in the last 3 years that I left my cell at home, so I didn’t get the “BLACKOUT! AAAAH!” texts from people and had to borrow a fellow PA’s cell (after the landlines crapped out) to call and reassure my paranoid father that I was fine.
At least our office didn’t freak out like a lot of people did. Apparently the entire ABC building was evacuated and everyone there was sent home.
And eventually, the power came back on, and I worked the remainder of my almost 16 hour day. On second thought, maybe they should have freaked out….