Cursing, I Drove Around

Still raining.  Still pouring.  The rain intermittent all yesterday had continued through the night.  Sometime after five thirty in the morning I had a lot of work completed.  Still had to prepare for an important call and off in the distance there was a sharp crack.  Then all the lights went out.  I looked and couldn’t confirm but I was pretty sure the rest of the street had lost power as well.  There wasn’t any thunder and lightening.  Hadn’t been any all evening.  But something had obviously taken place, off in the distance up by the Mylod’s house on the hill.

No power in the kitchen nor the living room.  Everything was off.  No internet of course.  And . . . the land line phone was off.  I looked outside and the sun was coming up, faintly behind the clouds and the wet.  I went to the bathroom to read my Egyptian history book.  This natural light wasn’t enough to read by so I used the flashlight on my iPhone, until I got tired and went back to bed around six, thinking I’d get back up on an hour to do my call. 

My mom had gone out to Starbucks to get everyone coffee and I resigned myself to heading out to the same place, to do my call.  At least it wasn’t raining any more. I needed to leave the house because the T Mobile sim card I had bought was useless in my mom’s house as it was in most of the greater New York area, discovered after buying it.  With a comfortable fifteen minutes to spare I rolled into Starbucks to discover that I still had no service. 

So I drove.  I drove, looking for cellular coverage which is a dumb way to spend one’s time.  Cursing, glancing, driving my way out I went back out to Route Nine and by the turn off to the IBM plant, I had a flash of connectivity.  I took the right turn, which I’d seen but never taken in over fifty years of consideration.  IBM.  They’ll have connectivity.  The plant was the anchor employer in the region until it wasn’t and it laid off thirty-thousand people twenty-five years ago.  But no matter, IBM still had a plant there.  IBM meant technology and money and surely connectivity. 

I drove down to a gate that must have once mattered.  The enormous parking lots were mostly empty but there were, as I suspected, a few hundred cars scattered around an area with capacity for tens of thousands of vehicles.  And I had one “bar” as they say, which was enough strength to dial into my Zoom bridge but not enough to hold it.  “Can you guys hear me?  I can hear you.  Can you hear me?”  Cursing, I drove around and around the parking lot with the mistaken idea that perhaps closer in towards the enormous plant I might afford the best connectivity.  Hugging the building, driving, cursing, I eventually determined it was useless. 

Cursing, more floridly now, I made the decision that I would have to drive on to somewhere else.  Cursing, knowing that the people on the call wouldn’t be happy to know that once again I had a connectivity issue.  Cursing, while I considered all the land that IBM had down here that they’d bought from my alma mater, the Oakwood School, earlier last century.  Cursing, I returned to Route Nine and spun my car up and over the clover leaf and continued on north, now, a solid fifteen minutes late, until I spied two bars and I pulled the car over at an empty parking lot next to a smoke shop and dialled in and did my call.

Thursday 7/26/18