The recent power outages remind you how much you depend on electricity. It’s like oxygen. Well, not exactly. No one suddenly realizes they can’t draw a breath and says, “Aww, crap, the oxygen’s out. Wonder if it’s just us. No, the neighbor is face down on the lawn, must be the neighborhood.”
But we always trust the juice to be there, on demand, whenever. You know it’s flowing. It’s never in doubt. You don’t lie in bed at 3 a.m. thinking, “If I got up suddenly and turned on a switch, I wonder if I’d catch them slacking.”
When I was a kid, we believed that Ben Franklin discovered electricity when he flew a kite that had a key on its string. A lightning bolt hit the kite, there was a spark, and wise old Ben, after he got up from the ground with his gray hair smoking, said, “Eureka! I shall call it Sky Tingling!” (He would later come up with a better term.)
This wasn’t true, entirely, but I still think of Ben when the power goes out. Which it did, a few days ago. I turned on the coffee maker, put something in the microwave and fired up a burner on the stove. It didn’t come on, so I tried a different burner and got the same result. Then I realized that the coffee maker wasn’t dripping and the microwave was inert, with blank readouts.
“I have tripped a circuit breaker,” I said, channeling my wise inner Ben. Checked the box: All good. Drat: Neighborhood outage? I checked to see if my neighbor was on the front lawn, asphyxiated. No, that was a sign of an oxygen outage.
Then I noticed that the kitchen lights were burning. The living room lights were on, too, but the dining room lights were dead. Basement: All dead.
Half the house had power, and half the house did not. I thought: Maybe I only paid half the light bill this month. No, that can’t be it.
If you are an electrical engineer waiting for a moment like this, when ordinary people are baffled by the mysteries of sparky juice, this is where you clear your throat and say, “Well, sounds like single phasing.” Then everyone looks at you with a blank expression until someone wearily says, “Do go on.”
