Lights Out

BOOM!
The thunder sounded nearly over head, the repercussion of the lightning strike nearby reverberating through my chest.
The lights at work turned off for an eye blink.
Turned on for another eye blink.
Turned off again.

We....we were powerless.
Emergency lights flicked on.
Glowing orange lights high above us.
Hardly making a difference in the darkness.
Everything remained black.

Quickly everyone pulled out flashlights,
or in most cases, their phones. flicking on the 'flashlight' already there.

I held up my Itouch to be able to see,
See the birds reacting like crazed animals as the light hit them,
See people up ahead,
See that the store can be quite dark with hardly any light.

Quickly we directed people from the back of the store to the front to make sure no one tripped or got hurt trying to navigate our aisles.

The registers, luckily, still had a little bit of back up power left allowing us to continue selling for a little while.
Even in the blackout, some people came in, wanting to get things. Wanting to know if we were still open.
One by one, we would take turns, guiding them back to what they wanted to buy with our phone flashlights showing the way.

But we couldn't stay open like this forever.
Our registers couldn't stay on forever.
If the power didn't come back on soon.
We would have to close.

We'd been given a fix by time of two hours later.
But, five minutes after the registers went dead.
The lights came back on.

It's totally crazy.
I hadn't experienced anything like that at work before.
Leading people in the dark.
Having no lights on whatsoever in the store. (the orange lights did nothing really.)
It was exciting!
Though I'm glad that this is a rare occurrence.
Things would have become chaos after too much longer if people continued to insist that they needed to buy stuff and we would be reduced to going into a back up system to make sure items were purchased.

Thankfully I had my Itouch with me. :D Trying to do all that in the dark without a light would have been super difficult. ^^

Until you next see these words;
I'll be watching the leaves.
Enjoy the day!

-Sarnic Dirchi