The first was a magnitude 5.8 earthquake last Tuesday. I was covering for our Front Desk Coordinator's lunch and, suddenly, the glass windows and walls ahead of me began undulating violently. I froze for a moment, and I think I mouthed to the student who happened to be standing next to the desk, "Oh my God, what's going on?" before coming to my senses and realizing that this was an earthquake. The MSB's response was, in a word, terrible. There seemed to be no emergency plan in place, and the fact that upper level administrators (as well as my superiors in my own office) were panicking and yelling only made me freak out more. It was a bit of a surreal experience, and, after about 20 minutes, we were told to gather our things quickly and go home (the excuse was that the structural integrity of the building had been called into question. Really, MSB? Really? You should have thought about that when the building was being constructed while I was an undergrad.
I think that the most interesting part of the day for me was to hear the wide range of reactions, which really did run the gamut from, "Oh, that's an earthquake. Okay" (my father) to "GET YOUR THINGS AND LEAVEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!" (an upper-level MSB administrator, who will remain nameless). The only thought that crossed my mind was that this was, in fact, an earthquake, while others, who had perhaps been in either DC or New York on 9/11, immediately thought that it was a bomb. We really are the post-9/11 generation, where we will always question whether a tremor or a strange noise is a naturally occurring phenomena or a terrorist attack.
Anyway, moving on, we (like much of the Eastern Seaboard) were hit over the weekend by Hurricane Irene, which was (I believe) only a Category 1 storm by the time it reached us, but wreaked havoc nonetheless. I believe that BGE reported about 160,000outages (at least that's what the TV at the gym told me this morning), and many unfortunate people are still without power. Luckily, for me, I moved in to my new apartment that same weekend (yay!), so the constant rain and wind initially provided me with justification for being a hermit for the weekend. But then, my type-A personality kicked in and I thought I might die of boredom. It reached 10:30 on Saturday night, and I was faced with a dilemma: I could either watch more mind-numbing TV on my computer, or I could put myself out of misery and go to sleep. Needless to say, I chose the latter.
I was kind of okay with old Irene...until I wasn't anymore. Dan, who had been on vacation with his family in Florida for the week, was visiting a friend in New Jersey for the weekend. Anticipating that the weather would be deteriorating, he tried to book a 2:40 train on Saturday, only to find that it was canceled. The next available train was on Monday morning at 5:15, which, when he called on Sunday afternoon to book it, he was ASSURED by Amtrak, would leave on-time. When he called back at around 10 that night to get his passenger number, he was told that the train had been canceled since Saturday, and the Amtrak rep had no idea why the other rep had told him that the train was going out. Understandably, he was livid. Wanting to make it back to DC sometime in his lifetime, he went to Newark and rented a car, arriving back in DC at around 3. The real kicker, though, comes when I tell you that he was phoneless. His phone had started freaking out (the screen went white, and then purple, and many shades in between) on Saturday, and by Sunday, all it was good for was dialing any number he had memorized (which was, essentially, his home number). So he got to the airport to drop off the car, and then had to look for a cab at 3:00 on a Monday morning (fact: this does not exist, at least not in DC), so, as he tells it, he was wandering the airport aimlessly, looking for anyone with a phone so that he could call a cab (because a VA cab company was not the one number he had memorized...shucks). Eventually, he made it home at around 4,and somehow survived the work day.
Moral of the story? Yes, I may have been bored out of my mind and, aside from two trips to the gym and numerous hours of unpacking, had nothing to do, my weekend paled in comparison to the suckiness that was Dan's. I'll take solace in that. Poor thing :(
(In related news, Saturday is our 6-month anniversary!!!! And, fun fact, both of our dads were also born on that day and happen to share the same first name...weird, right?!)
Because it's me (and we all know how much I love pictures), here is the now infamous tongue-in-cheek picture of DC earthquake "damage".
No comments:
Post a Comment