K30a wrote:

Am watching TV and seeing seas of people on the streets of
NYC. My goodness, what a big power outage! When you get your
power back on, any rec.ponders have a story to tell?
Stay cool...

Wow, I looked that up on CNN.com. What a mess.

Several years ago I lived in the San Joaquin valley in central California.
It was about 110 Fahrenheit when the big outage hit; I forget how many
states were affected. We had several families visiting us, many with
children, so we though we'd better go get some bottled water, ice for the
cooler, etc. We went four places before we found a place that would let us
in the door and that was a service station. We grabbed what we needed, but
the person at the cash register wouldn't let us pay because, of course, the
register didn't work.

(Normally, this is where I break into my old fogy routine about how come
kids can't make simple change in their heads, but you've probably all heard
it in some form or another)

We finally convinced them to figure it out on paper, but he couldn't quite
get it right. So we figured it out for him (including some non-whole number
for tax which blew him away) but he wasn't sure we weren't ripping him off.
We got him to believe in our integrity, but by then he couldn't make the
actual change. We offered to just pay to the next higher dollar, but he was
quite worried that when everything came back on, he wouldn't balance.

In the end, we had about 5 people, all in the same situation. We added up
all of our bills, managed to make the right amount for the clerk, accepted
close enough amongst ourselves and left with the stuff - good thing too, the
power was off for about 3 days.

Joe





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