wednesday it's uptown... thursday it's downtown

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Electric Utilities and Y2K : One Thread

i lived in manhattan and the nyc area for approximately 10 years and i can tell you that this must have been a real treat... a little bit more of this and there is going to be some real excitement in the big apple.

what struck me as odd though, the less than wealthy areas are the ones that are going down... is this another coincidence?

this from the ny post:

If you wanted to see New York City brought to its knees, felled by the sudden failure of the machines that make modern existence possible, you needed look no further than the East Village yesterday, six months before the century's close.

At East Village Pharmacy on Avenue A, early-morning shoppers cleaned the shelves of candles and flashlight batteries, as if preparing for nuclear war.

Just outside, traffic was a free-for-all at the lawless intersections of Alphabet City, ungoverned by working traffic lights or working humans.

http://www.nypost.com/070899/commentary/10390.htm

_never in human history have so many humans blindly trusted that so many other humans won't screw up._

dr ed yardeni

-- Anonymous, July 09, 1999

Answers

marianne,

I was there! You're my neighbor! Actually I was on 14th Street. The interesting thing, to me, was that Con ED was feeding some power to the post office. Yup!

The other interesting thing was Friday in the chiropractor's office I hear a woman telling someone else about her experience in the blackout and then I hear the word "midnight." She said, "What do you think is going to happen to the electricity when the clock strikes midnight on 12/31?" We talked and she is preping. Then I talked to the receptionist later. Her husband works for the Housing Authority and she is preping... Their end of year vacation plans were cancelled by the Housing Authority... She's just a very ordinary person with kids who had a really glum expression to match the situation. She knows it's not going to be a party at all.

-- Anonymous, July 10, 1999


Moderation questions? read the FAQ