Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Lights Out

You may have noticed I didn't post anything yesterday (okay...I've been slacking a little more lately, so maybe you didn't notice anything that out of the ordinary), but yesterday I had a legitimate excuse! 

I was sitting minding my own business, doing my work, helping patients when the there was a massive click and large whoosh and the entire Clinic went black. 

My first thought was this is Revolution! (the tv show, I don't watch, where all the power is out in the whole world for some unknown and mysterious reason and all of society has collapsed) 

I was initiating my mental survival plan as people in the building started to come out of the woodwork and congregate in the main lobby of the building. 

Upon investigation (looking out the widow) we were the only building without power. No world wide power outage sending us back to 1879. 

Apparently our building has it's own power box and the transformer blew knocking our power out. Don't ask me what the technically means since when I hear the word transformer I think semi trucks turning into  robots...so instead of Revolution we are in a Transformer movie. Optimus Prime and I could be BFFs. 

The were have trouble locating a transformer in the area to come to the rescue, but fortunately there was one located just 30 minutes away. 

They told us we wouldn't have power for 4 to 6 hours. 

We lived in a power hungry world. Almost everything we do runs on power. Do you know how much of my job runs on power? Almost all of it. It shut the place down

Everyone in the Clinic was trapped in darkness and unable to work. They had nothing to do, so they called their patients, packed up, and went home. Only to return with the power. 

My department, Physical Therapy, we were troopers. We are located on the first floor and have a lot of windows for natural lighting. We didn't let the power being out stop us from doing our job. Armed with clipboards, pens, and paper and pre-printed schedules we continued to do our jobs and treat our patients. 

Our world may have gone dark, but we did not give up or give into the darkness. 

Admin was hanging out in the lobby doing damage control for patients who came in not knowing their appointments were canceled or had some problems and we were working. Everyone else in our four floor building was gone except us

After the news paper released a press releases stating we were closed it slowed down some and it was basically like a black out party with PT and admin.

I thought it was nice to take a break from staring at a computer screen, which I do almost all the times my eyes are open. It was relaxing. 

The biggest issue was we didn't have power to the coffee machine! Those of us left almost created mass hysteria, but one of the PT's made a Starbucks run when she didn't have a patient. She is the real hero of this story. She saved the day.  

Around 1:00 the power came back on and those who had gone home came back and had to deal with all the patients from the morning trying to call and reschedule and squeeze them in somewhere. It was a nightmare. Not for us! All we had to do is block off some time for the PTs to enter their handwritten notes into the computer. 

I almost wish we had power outages more often. It was great way to break up the monotony of the week. 

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