The Music Stopped

There is an old song lyric that I haven’t heard for years but this morning it popped into my head. It goes, “The music stopped.  But we went on dancing.  Yes we went on dancing, for we didn’t know.  Because the lights were low and we were in love.”  I woke up this morning and the lights were not just low.  The lights were out, the furnace was not working so no heat; no stove, no oven, no TV, no computers, no Internet, no morning news, no telephone, no hot water.  My wife Jean took her cell phone and called Piedmont Electric.  It was our third power outage in the past week.  Piedmont was installing a new power line and twice they had cut into our telephone line as well by accident. Fortunately, they had us up and running just an hour after Jean’s phone call.  We will set all the clocks again, the TV will do it’s thing and get the satellites back on line and except for me having this idea for this article everything will get back to normal.  But what if….there I go again playing that old game of mine….what if?  What if it was six weeks or six months before we got back up and running with electric power?  I guess we’d learn to dance without music, cook without an electric stove or oven and we’d sure make certain we didn’t run out of propane gas for our fireplace.

Over the years I have done a lot of safety work in the Power Industry.  I’ve stood in front of perhaps a hundred audiences or more in that industry and told the people how important they were but it takes an outage every now and then for me to really appreciate the wonderful utility services we have here in this nation.  Thank you Piedmont Electric for getting back on line.  I got the message loud and clear. No need to remind me again. – Art Fettig

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