I Was Late For Work, But It Wasn’t My Fault

You know how when you start a new job you really want to make a good impression, or at least you want to avoid making a bad one?

Yeah, I’ve been at my new job for about three weeks. (Having a great time, BTW. Thanks for asking) And today we had an 8:00am meeting with our big client. I was late. I was about 25 minutes late for a two hour meeting. I arrived to see a Slack message from my boss, “Are you joining the client call?”

He saw me as I walked through the door.

But, it wasn’t my fault.

It was. . .no one’s fault. It was God’s fault? See, we had a terrible lightning storm last night. It wasn’t forecast. In fact, the forecast calls for 10 day of beautiful last summer sunshine. So, this lightning storm came through last night. Lots of pretty lightning. Even some rain. But, lots of lightning.

And part of that lightning hit a transformer in my neighborhood.

Lightning: 1
Transformer: 0

We lost power. It was out for several hours. Of course it shut down all the computers and the digital clocks. I was all prepared to go to sleep and use my phone or something to figure out when I needed to get up.

I don’t use an alarm clock. My lovely wife needs more sleep than I do. I’ve learned over the years to wake up at a certain time. I check the clock, but only to tell me if I woke up too early.

But, none of that was going to be necessary. The power came back on before I went to bed. I reset all the clocks and I went to bed. Problem solved.

Well, it would be solved if there hadn’t been another power outage three hours later that again, killed all the digital clocks. When I got up in the morning, I had no idea what time it was. It was not 7:00am. It was closer to 7:30.

And that’s why I was late.

I’m glad I didn’t even have to bring up the fact that Pleasant Grove is currently under a boil order for all drinking water.

Stay safe

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

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