The power went out at work a few weeks ago, but only stayed out for a few minutes – just long enough for us all to mill around aimlessly, discuss having a rubber band shooting war, and finally break down and call the landlord for the office building. Today, however, the power went out again, and this time it stayed out. There was the usual rubber band battle, and the usual milling about, but then it started getting really old.

Luckily the air conditioner guy had been out yesterday puttering around with vents and temperature gauges and automated timers, so the office was nice and comfortable when the power went out. I say 'luckily' because today was the hottest it's been so far (and not even summer yet!) and when I finally gave up and decided to walk over to the buildings nearby to see if anyone there had heard from SMUD (since calling SMUD only dumped us into a recursive voicemail loop from hell), it was like walking into a sauna. I hate the heat, but what is even worse than dry heat is heat with humidity. Blech.

The rest of my coworkers had things they could do that did not require computers, but the unfortunate thing about being the person responsible for both building databases and writing fascinating articles all about the world of construction is that one cannot really do any of these things without the aid of a computer. So after spinning in my chair a little bit and watering my plants and doodling aimlessly on a notepad, I finally gave up and went home early.

Too bad this didn't happen yesterday. Yesterday I returned from my lunchly Curves expedition to somehow find myself crawling around on the floor taping down an outline of a body (conveniently modeled – at least the top half – by one of the estimators). I'm still not exactly sure why it was that they all decided we needed a body outlined on the floor, but what the heck. I even got creative and put the bottom half of the body about five feet away. If the power had gone out yesterday, who knows what might have happened. Take several adults with strangely warped brains, a jumbo roll of masking tape, and the possibilities are endless. We could have had little taped body outlines everywhere.