The power went off last night.
I wake at 1:18am to a flash of blue and a bang. I check the house. Power in the back half is out but the rest is okay. The house isn’t burning down or anything. I’ll worry about it in the morning, I decide, and go back to bed.
Thirty minutes later I’m woken by a cacophony of beeps and other noises. All the bots and electrical devices are going crazy, as they do when their power supply goes off. We have so many of them, and each one makes a different noise. I get up again (the clock is off this time, I check time by the phone). The whole house is black. No lights, no power. Half the street is dark, too.
I go back to bed.
The power comes on at 2:44. Yes, all the bots and other devices tell me they’re starting up again. The radio clock, with its internal battery, comes back set on the right time. Hallelujah.
It used to be when the power went out all the clocks would go, too, and you’d spend time in the middle of the night trying to reset the alarm. Or wake up next morning having overslept–after all, you’d spent part of the night awake, hadn’t you.
“Such a simple thing,” I tell Sherylyn the next day. “But so smart. Batteries in clocks that store the time and alarm information. Inventions like that are amazing.”
I mean, sure, clock radios are great too, but someone (probably like me, who’d had to reset their clock in the middle of the night) came up the idea of putting a battery into that clock radio so that when the power went out, it retained all its settings. It’s so convenient.
So here’s a nod to those people who take great inventions and make them just that little bit better. Thank you.