Phone Call of the Day

A few minutes ago, I was in the middle of a 2-person meeting at work, when the office phone rang, with no caller ID identified (which just means it came from an external location, I think).  Excusing myself, I answered the phone, to hear an automated voice.   (“Oy,” I thought.  “The telemarketers have tracked me to work!”)

No, it was a collect call from King County Jail!  They had a recording of the person’s name (someone male), garbled and unintelligible so I had no idea what the name was (although maybe if I knew the guy’s voice and name, I could have understood what was said), and then a request for me to accept the phone charges or not.

Two user experience issues with this:

• No idea what the cost of accepting the call was
  
• No way to replay the person’s name if I didn't catch it the first time around (and since I was a bit shocked to get a call from the Jail, I wasn’t listening all that closely)

So I looked at the phone for a couple minutes, and hung up.   Then quickly called about the only person I could think of outside of work who would have and would call my work number, just to be sure he wasn’t in Jail.   (He wasn’t.)

Hope it was (a) a wrong number rather than someone I know who was depending on me, and (b) the inmate isn’t limited to the stereotyped single attempt to call someone and I blew it for him.   There hasn’t been a second call, so who knows…?

Where were you when the lights went out?

Me, I was driving up Rainier Avenue.

It’s always a bit freaky to be walking or driving underneath a streetlight just as it decides to go out.  (Did I cause that?)   For years, I used to clap twice after that would happen (it happened at least once a week to me, I swear), claiming that it was a “psychic clap-on/clap-off light”.   The light would go off because I was about to clap.  Prove that it wasn’t.

Anyway…

The weird feeling of a streetlight gong off is nothing quite like driving through an intersection and the lights suddenly going off for blocks in every direction.   (Shit!  Did I cause that?)   That’s what happened last night, at around 11:30 pm, on Rainier near 23rd.   Bright flash and then dark.   Then about a block further, another flash as everything came back on, and then immediately off again, and then a couple more repeats of that in the next few seconds.   It started to look like a scene from a horror film.

Another half mile along and the power was on in that neighborhood, although when I cam back down Rainier an hour later, the power was still off in the zone I had been driving through.   I assume it’s back on this morning.  I don't see anything on the Seattle Times website today, so I assume it was nothing big enough to mention.   No semi plowing into a transformer station to destroy a time-traveling killer robot or anything.