Power outage is a message from above
I'm not here to report on the specifics of this afternoon's power outage in Woodland Hills (and elsewhere?), only to speculate on its cause.
Kurt Vonnegut did it.
In the shopping center at Ventura and Topanga Canyon about lunchtime Thursday, all of the restaurants and stores had hand-lettered signs on their doors, each reading something like "Sorry -- Closed Due to Power Failure."
I was walking past Vons, where an employee stood in the doorway. I asked why every store had to close if there was no electricity. I mean, I could understand a restaurant being out of commission if it couldn't heat food. I could understand a grocer's trouble selling ice cream if it's half-melted. But what's the problem at the video store (the comedy shelf was going to spoil?), the baseball-card shop or the karate studio?
"We can't ring up sales," the Vons woman said, without computers.
"Just write down what you've sold and punch it in later," I said.
A man in a manager's tie appeared in the store's semi-darkness.
"We're not going to do that," he said of my pen-and-paper idea.
"Besides," he said, "we'd be worried about safety."
OK, there would be dark corners in a big grocery store. But what would be so dangerous in the smaller stores?
"There'd be liability issues," the manager said. "The lawyers would be first in line."
There was a quote from Kurt Vonnegut with one of the obituaries Thursday morning:
"The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings, not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions and systems."
The way I figure it, the first thing Vonnegut did when he got upstairs Wednesday night was arrange for the windstorm that presumably caused the electricity to go out in the West San Fernando Valley.
The power went out and all the human beings in one big shopping center in one little corner of the globe became useless appendages to machines, etc.
So thanks for the practical lesson in the pitfalls of progress.
Now, when is Fatburger open again?