So power came back at our place on Saturday, after six days out, and I've spent the last two days just letting my laptop charge to 100% over and over because apparently that's a thing you do now. Small pleasures. If you're reading this from somewhere that Sandy didn't touch, some of this is going to sound like a weird camping trip. If you're reading it from Hoboken or the Rockaways or half of New Jersey, you already know, and I'm sorry, and also we should compare notes on battery packs because I have opinions now.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about a multi-day outage: it's not really about the lights. It's about your phone. Everyone in my building was doing this weird choreography by day two, walking around the block with a charging cable dangling out of a coat pocket, looking for a car that would let them borrow a cigarette lighter port for twenty minutes. I did this. I am not proud of it but I did it, standing on a corner near a stranger's idling Honda like it was a campfire.
The one genuinely useful thing I own is a battery pack I bought back in September for $39 at a Best Buy near me, one of those brick-shaped Anker things, and I want to publicly retract every mean thing I ever thought about spending forty bucks on a box of lithium. It got my phone through three full charges before it died itself. My laptop, on the other hand, was basically useless past hour six no matter what anyone tells you about "all day battery life" — that number is measured under lab conditions by someone who is not also refreshing Twitter every four minutes hoping to see when Con Ed thinks your street might come back on.
A few things that actually worked, if you're taking notes for next time (and after this week I think everyone on the East Coast is taking notes for next time):
- The Panera two towns over had power the whole week and by Wednesday had basically become an ad hoc coworking space. Every outlet had a phone charger duct-taped to it by like Thursday. Nobody said anything, it was just understood.
- My local library kept its wifi on even with the building closed, which meant you could sit in the parking lot at 11pm in your car with the heat running, laptop balanced on the passenger seat, and actually get email working. Slightly bleak. Also effective.
- Car chargers are not optional equipment, they are load-bearing infrastructure, and I am buying three more before winter.
The thing I keep coming back to, though, is how fast the whole neighborhood sorted itself into people-with-generators and people-without, and how weirdly territorial the generator people got about it. There was a guy two doors down running his the entire week, out loud, at all hours, and by day four I genuinely think he'd started enjoying being the only house on the block with lights on. I don't want to be too harsh about it, generators are a completely reasonable thing to own, but there's a specific kind of smugness that comes over a person once they own one, and I noticed it happening to him in close to real time. If I ever buy a generator I'd like someone to keep me honest about this.
Also, strange to be writing this the night before an election, with half my neighbors still running on extension cords and the other half back to normal like nothing happened. There's something a little unreal about it, going to the polls tomorrow past a block that still has trees down across the sidewalk. Not going to turn this into a political post, that's not what techpad is for, but it's hard not to notice the timing.
Anyway. My actual point, if I have one, is that the stuff that got me through the week wasn't anything fancy — it was a $39 battery brick, a car with a full tank (fill up early, before the lines start, I cannot stress this enough), and knowing which coffee shop within walking distance had power. None of it required an app. Feels almost quaint to type that out.
Going to go stare at my fully charged laptop a little longer now. Small pleasures.