A while back, one of the geniuses at Pacific Gas & Electric tripped over a wire and plunged most of North Beach into the stone age. We were forced to rub PalmPilot‘s together for heat and forage for arugula. Cappuccino-makers ceased making that whooshy, foam noise. The silence was deafening. The area was paralyzed for hours. White-collar workers stepped out onto the street and rubbed their eyes as if they were seeing the sun for the first time. Many others, stranded without internet connections or cable TV, committed suicide rather than face a bleak and frightening convenience-less world.
The rest of us fought bravely onward, somehow mustering the strength to sit at our desks where the phone would not, nay could not, ring. We filled the silence with something called "conversation" and pickup Nerf® football games in the hallway. Eventually, the wiring problem was fixed by the crackerjack Keystone Cops-like PG&E crew. In the silence, you could hear the whirring of international wheeling-and-dealing spooling up again. Followed by a chorus of taxi cab horns, that signaled to all normalcy had returned.
