twovictorianladies

I was over at a friend’s house this afternoon and we had a power outage for a couple of hours. We were just about to make a cup of coffee (for her) and a cup of tea (for me) but we had to cancel that idea because both the coffee maker and the teapot were electric, as was the stove. We were able to keep working on the project we’d been spending the afternoon on, at least temporarily, since our computers’ batteries were more or less full, but I had to shut down after a while as my battery got low. I couldn’t call home because her phone’s battery wasn’t charged and I couldn’t get a cell phone signal. Although my friend had bought food for dinner, it required heating up. She was about to suggest that we go out for dinner when she realized that her car was trapped in the garage behind electric doors that wouldn’t open without power. (At least my car was out in the driveway, accessible!) And when she asked me to look up the number of the electric company so that she could report the outage, I couldn’t, because with no power the wireless router had gone out and I had no internet connection.

A hundred and fifty years ago when my characters were living, or would have if they were not fictional, they cooked on wood stoves, traveled by horse power (even if in carriages), and sent messages from house to house either by footman, or by the extremely efficient (at that time) postal service.  A power outage? What was that?

We are owned by our labor-saving devices.