Does the electric company have any idea how much trouble these fairly regular little flickerings and teeny little instanteous power failures cause in the modern household?
In the good old days, this was no big deal. The lights flickered while you were gone or asleep and so what? You probably didn`t even notice there had been an unusual electrical event in your absence.
Even if you were home when it happened, and you noticed the lights blink off and back on, you hardly needed to race around changing the second hands on all your clocks. Of course, that was when we all had real clocks, with the big hands and the little hands. After all, what were a few missing seconds, even a whole bunch of seconds?
But all that past nonchalance about hiccoughs in the power system has changed in today`s high-tech era.
Digital clocks, which appear on the face of virtually every appliance made today, are the intermittent-outtage snitches of the `90s. And they aren`t the only electronic gadgets that take it personally when the lights blink off for a few seconds.
Here`s what happens at my house when the electricity fails even momentarily: VCRs, of course, immediately switch to a blinking ”12:00,”
requiring a search for the instruction manual and many tense trials and errors while the time and date are reset, not to mention the loss of any shows that might have been laboriously preprogrammed. But most of us never figured out how to do that anyway, so it isn`t usually an issue.
My TV, which displays the time and channel in the upper right corner, loses the time, but leaves behind the ”a” or ”p” to indicate morning or evening. After getting used to seeing ”P 9:00 Ch.2” on the screen, it took me some time of studying a ”P Ch.2” message before I realized the time had vanished.
Of course, the procedure for resetting the time on my TV is completely different from that on my VCR. And the timer on my stereo tuner, which for some reason operates on military digital time, requires yet a different step- by-step process. Of course.
In my kitchen there are 5 digital clocks (none of which ever flips over to the next minute at exactly the same time-but that`s another story). When the lights go off, the green readout on my microwave oven simply goes blank, the red one on my coffeemaker does the blinking ”12” routine, while the greenish-blue clock on my intercom radio and the plain black readout on my phone stand pat because they have battery backups. But the bright blue digital display on my stove, just to be different, flashes ”88:88.”
In the days when we all had alarm clocks that ticked, if the power went off and came back on, we just got awakened a little later. At least, in my sweet memories of the past, I recall that the alarm setting, which was some kind of mechanical barrier that the hands tripped as they moved into place, came back with the power, although delayed by the time of the outtage.
But not your handy dandy digital alarm clock. It`s back to the blinking
”12s” again, until you wake up and reset both the time and alarm.
During dark and stormy nights, this is enough to keep some of us with important early-morning appointments lying awake in fear that just maybe, possibly, the power might go out, and we might wake up to the horrifying sight of much-too-bright sunlight streaming through the windows, and yes, that blinking ”12.”
My speaker phone pops back on in the speaker-phone mode after a power failure with a nearly deafening dial tone. If you don`t get to it fast enough, it switches to that irritating announcement from the phone company telling you that you have a phone off the hook. This can be quite disconcerting if the power goes off and comes back on while you`re asleep. But it does wake you up, so you can reset your digital alarm clocks. Maybe it was planned that way.
My cordless phones, on the other hand, even though they have batteries in them for some function or another, lose all those tediously programmed speed- dial numbers every time there is a slight burp on the power lines.
Maybe the solution is simply to keep an old-fashioned travel alarm clock next to the bed for emergencies, and learn to live with the rest of those flashing numerals. Who needs that many clocks in the house anyway?
