Closed Early For The First Time In 6 Yrs.

[NightAngel]

So, this evening just before 9pm I happened to look out the front window at work.

There was a blinding flash of green and blue lights and loud crackling noise through the air. I knew immediately what it was... a transformer exploding.

And then... black- the whole grid down.

Turns out there was a wreck and someone took out the whole pole. I know nothing of the status of the driver(s) right now. I hope they are okay.

So, what never happens happened- we closed early. Three whole hours early.
I've never closed early for anything before. My CSR and I were somewhat torn between, "I hope no one was hurt," and "WHOO! We get to go home!"

[Ree]

Yeah, we've had those days without power, and we don't always know right away what's going on. If it's an accident, you hope all is well with the driver, if it's a transformer fire, you hope it's not serious. Mixed feelings about losing a few hours of pay if we close up and send people home, but at the same time, thinking, "Wooh! I get to go home early!"

We had a split second power outage at work yesterday.
I never did find out what it was, but because none of our receiving ccomputers are on backup, and the girls hadn't been saving their receiving report every 15 minutes like they're supposed to, we lost a huge portion of the receiving log, which means I get to track everything down and check to see if it's really short shipped or not.

[TruthHurts]

Must be an epidemic, my town had a transformer explode on a certain grid. Liquor store, video store, and three hotels sans power for six hours. A few years ago I worked at a bookstore when the whole town had an outage. My bosses left the store open anyhoo and figuring out taxes via calculator when you are math dyslexic not fun.

[Horsetuna]

One time while working at a busy hardware/home store, the power flickered during a store. Everyone's computer stayed onl,ine - except mine. Which went down, and wouldnt' come back up.

I still coudlnt' go home though. they wouldnt' even let me go home when I was about to puke my guts out. I quit the next day. It wasn't worth it.

[digilight]

I remember back in 94 during the Northridge Earthquake (southern california) we ran to the livingroom and looked out the back (wait for it here it comes how smart we were) sliding glass door (yup 8 feet of nice breakable untempered 40 year old glass) and just as the shaking stopped we could see the transformings exploding all over the area, it looked kind of like bombs or something but it was just one right after another. It was dark about 16 hours or so if I remember right for us that day.

[CanadaGirl]

Back when I used to work at a Canadian grocery store, we had a power outage for a few hours. So, all the tills were essentially useless. People stood around or left the store with their carts just whereever. I think it was about an hour until the power came back. Sooo many transactions to cancel and crap in random carts to put away. Sigh.

[Sofar]

Man, the electricity is awful around here. We never really get blackouts but the lights is always flickering and knocking out the computer. Fortunately we've only got the one register so it isn't that difficult to get it up and running again. And the electricity is very definitely dirty, you even notice variations in voltage by staring at the lights.

[Discourtesy Clerk]

I haven't yet had the opportunity to experience a power outage in my store, but there was an incident a few weeks back where the tills were shut down (24-hr store, we do this at the same time every night so that the money can be counted,
or something like that, usually takes 5 minutes) ...and they would not turn back on. After 10 minutes or so, customers began leaving items on the belts and in the carts at the checkstands, and just leaving. Every checker and bagger was being employed to run (actually run, there were only about five of us total) to put all the abandoned perishables back in their respective coolers. Lots of people buy milk and eggs at 10pm, I soon discovered. Someone finally got the bright idea to stand at the front door and shoo people off while the problem was being fixed. 45 minutes later, the tills finally came up...and we had no customers left. It was a fun night, though.