Ten years later, I remember it like it was yesterday.
I was sitting in my parents’ basement, lost in procrastination on the internet as half a dozen work-related tasks lay spread out on my desk.
Deep down I knew I should be working, or creating—thinking, at least—and yet I sat there, mindlessly surfing the internet, my brain on autopilot as the laptop screen filled it with other people’s thoughts.
Then, with a deafening crack of thunder, the power went out, taking the WiFi with it.
Suddenly, I was left with no distractions, or external stimulations to drive the cognitive process.
And then, as I sat there in the darkness, alone, something strange and, dare I say, magical happened.
I began thinking.
A handwritten journal entry from that night (inexplicably written in the third person) shows my train of thought.
“Suddenly, the distraction is gone. He wants to look, to be distracted—to numb himself with mindless entertainment. But the power is out,” the younger me wrote.
“His creaking synapses build steam as he consciously directs his thoughts towards an impossibly different time when ‘power’ didn’t exist. What forms did mindless entertainment take in those times? Did people let it consume their lives, direct their consciousness or barrage them with advertisements?
“Is the absence of electronic entertainment the sole reason why human minds were active enough to solve most of Earth’s mysteries (presumably) and invent electronic entertainment? What kind of potential is being blindsided by this nonsense? What amount of dormant greatness is being comatosed?”
At this point, the power came back on, saving me from the existential, soul-affirming freedom of possibly unlocking something greater deep within myself.
Whew. Back to YouTube.
For a time, anyway—the storm outside raged on through the night, and we woke the next morning to another power outage.
The “Big Blackout of 2012,” as it later came to be called, took out power for thousands of residents in the Prince Albert, Sask., area for more than 24 hours, and power wasn’t restored to all residents for weeks.
I was an intern reporter for the Prince Albert Daily Herald at the time, and I couldn’t have asked for a better journalism boot camp.
How do you publish a daily newspaper without electricity? The old-fashioned way.
With no phones or internet, we now had no choice but to pound the pavement, notebooks in hand: walk over to City Hall to hear what local officials are saying; drive down to the hospital to see how they’re coping; swing by the wastewater treatment plant for an update on levels; go knock doors to get some resident reaction.
We powered our phones and a single laptop using a car adaptor, which we then took turns writing our stories on. I don’t remember now how we got them down to the team in Moose Jaw for layout and printing, but I suspect my editor may have had to read our copy over the phone—just like the good old days.
I learned a lot from that experience, the main takeaway being that while technology is ultra convenient, it’s not infallible, and we would be wise to build in backup plans for when the system fails—like it did for more than 12 hours on Friday, July 8, when Rogers experienced a country-wide outage that impacted thousands of Canadians.
The outage took out internet, wireless and home phone service; created difficulties for some trying to call 911; even sidelined Interac and e-transfer services for many businesses.
It’s unclear exactly how many were affected, but according to its 2021 annual report, Rogers had about 11.3 million wireless subscribers last year, and about 2.7 million internet subscribers.
According to U.K.-based “internet observer” NetBlocks, the outage “knocked out a quarter of the country’s observable connectivity.”
So, not insignificant.
In Whistler, the Interac outage served as the biggest nuisance, though luckily credit cards were still working, said Whistler Chamber board chair Diana Chan.
“With customers having moved to cashless payments during the pandemic, most had alternative payment methods, therefore [we saw] a minimal financial impact for businesses,” Chan said, adding that, after the events of the past two years, the one-day outage amounted to “just another hiccup” for Whistler businesses.
“[Given] the resilience and creative servicing that many businesses and frontline workers have developed through the pandemic and with the ongoing supply chain issues, this seemed like just another hurdle to clear. Thankfully, it was resolved in less than 24 hours.”
During the extended outage, I saw more than one Rogers customer express a strange relief on Twitter that they suddenly couldn’t use their phone—that for all intents and purposes, they were unreachable.
I can relate to that feeling.
Last year, humanity was offered a wondrous, albeit brief, morning of respite when Facebook’s servers inexplicably went offline for much of the day.
All morning, I entertained a thrilling possibility, however unlikely I knew it was: What if Facebook never comes back?
I felt like an inmate serving a life sentence being marched across the yard, only to catch a glimpse of an unattended gate.
In that moment, long-suppressed memories of freedom in the real world come flooding back—a tantalizing reminder of all that was; could maybe be again.
And then you’re shunted unceremoniously back inside the concrete walls to your cell with one last fleeting glance over your shoulder at the unwatched gate.
The memory of freedom fades, with time. But it doesn’t die.
I’m being overly dramatic, of course. Facebook isn’t mandatory. The law doesn’t dictate that I must own a cell phone, and rub my dumb thumbs all over it for hours every day, thinking other people’s thoughts and getting angry.
But these are the costs of participating in the modern world—for me, at least. Your mileage may vary.
Ten years after my power outage-induced epiphany, I still struggle with mindless distractions.
Our technology is nothing short of a modern miracle, enabling us to do and see things our ancestors could only dream of.
It’s also a curse, blinding us to the things that really matter and too often filling us with questionable ideas.
It took me far too long to learn that, like most things with life and the universe, it’s about balance.
I hope you enjoyed this meandering exploration of outages.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go find a river to sit beside.
I’ve got some thinking to do.
