I was woken this morning by the flash of lightning and the long low rumbling of thunder. It was quite a storm, a tempest perhaps but it was dark outside so I rolled over and tried to get back to sleep.
It was no good however. The storm was too big and too long. I checked the clock to see what the time was but the screen on my clock radio was black. The power had gone off and with it, my wake up call.
I got up to flick the trip switch. I knew that the power was on locally as the street lights were still on but my thoughts had turned to our data centres. Had they been affected? Are all our systems still running?
A friend of mine has been struggling for a few days now with a complete loss of power at their data centre and I thought of him.
I got downstairs, switched the electricity back on and checked a couple of things on my phone to see that we were still up and running. Phew! It was only half past four and so I went back upstairs. I lay in bed thinking about how we have come to rely upon electricity. Our whole world could not survive without it. It is the one thing that fuels us as a species. Without it we would not exist in anywhere near the numbers that we do.
We rely on it for everything, from getting up, to making meals, to pumping fuel into the car and powering the technology we use for work and entertainment. We are completely reliant upon it and addicted to it.
A storm and a tripped switch are enough to put us into a spin and in the dark hours of this morning I lay in bed and realised what a precarious position we are in.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 