The past thirty six hours has been quite a hot mess, resulting in most of the town being without some combination of electricity, fuel, or internet since Sunday. We are still trying to make sense of the cascading failure that forced us all to go outside and barbecue all the meat in the freezer before it could go bad and eat any ice cream before it pulled a Frosty the Snowman.
Close as we can figure it, three things made this possible. First, the popular cell-phone game I’d rather not mention again, thank you very much, has lead to an influx of players to our town. And to think, we were concerned about wannabe biologists coming here chasing imaginary animals…
Well, the sudden spike of users lagged our sorry little cell tower into oblivion, so the local utility came out to install some kind of upgrade. Unfortunately, between the current draw of their equipment and all the visitors charging their cell phones on any unguarded outlet, the recently repaired substation tripped some kind of breaker and died with an resounding “POP!”
With no power or cell service, most of out initially-welcomed guests got bored and went back to the next town over to chase invisible elephants. Meanwhile, in the course of fixing the power, they misread a schematic and managed to sever the fiber optic link to our town’s datacenter, rendering most internet service offline. Unfortunately, the only way to get power back up was with a software patch, that now could not be downloaded because of no cell, network, or power.
The locals that remained waited patiently around Stumpy’s eating all the frozen treats out of the freezer before they could melt. Well, we were completely beside ourselves. Well, by each other at least. A big group migrated to the Sculpture garden where the Leverite Rock&Gem Society gave an impromptu workshop on working with obsidian and old Jay Smith added some musical accompaniment to the presentation before putting on a little show of his own. Oh, how we suffered.
It was in the midst of our making-do that a wild-eyed McKesey leapt up, shouted “Eureka!” then went running off toward the power substation. We didn’t think much of it until we heard a loud crackle of lightning and all the lights and radios all over town started to pop back to life. Seems Ken figured that, if a random bit of metal could short out the substation, maybe a less random one could bypass the issue and get power restored. Well, I guess you don’t work as an engineer in Massachusetts without picking up a few unorthodox tricks. Soon life got back to normal, and we mourned the end of free Fruitypops and lukewarm beer. But hope springs eternal. It is summer after all, and it is amazing how many little power hiccups we have when the evening weather is nice but the tourists run thick.
At this point, the local telecom is working with the Stephenson kid that manages our internet service to get the fiber optic link fully patched. Bill says it’s going so slow because the guy they sent spends more time yakking than working. It seems that the tech they sent…really likes imaginary animals. Real ones. So, again, keep your eyes open for this kid.
