Tuesday, June 24, 2008

No Power

TRAVEL

I was in Oakwood, IL, when I stop for the day. What did I notice? Power outage. The whole block has no power! No electricity means lights don't work, and more importantly, cash registers don't work. No power means no sale.

That's too bad. I think Americans today take it for granted that power will always be available. As you can see, that's not always true. How about that Millenium bug scare a while back? People were stocking food and generators. How quickly people forget.

You would think that people will have a fallback plan for when things go wrong. That's what emergency preparedness is all about. You'd think that store managers would at least sell things and write the receipt on paper by hand. No access to cash register? Ask for exact change or generous tip, or IOU that expires in a few hours. It's not that hard to plan and do.

Yet, people were milling around doing nothing. No power, no sale. And that's that.

Huh? This is supposed to be a great country? People with American Ingenuity? Mexicans can do better than that!

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