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A city plunged into Darkness. It's Ari's Fault

Monday, January 30, 2012

The front door slammed shut hard enough to make me get out of my comfortable bed, pushing aside my book, my iPad, the TV remote and my glass of wine. What can I say; I’m a multi-tasker.  It wasn’t late, maybe 8:30, and Ari, 17, had been at school with his robotics club working in the shop.

He stood in front of the closed door, eyes as round as saucers, out of breath.

“You are never going to guess what happened,” he panted. He peered out of the window, and then locked the door. “I think I caused a big problem. The power is out.”

“Yeah, I know that,” I told him. “I have people in my Twitter feed that started saying the power was out all up and down Brant Street. Someone even said the traffic lights were out further north of the downtown core.” My son slumped against the door, his hand over his face.

“That far?” he groaned. Catching his breath, he continued. “I was working on the plasma cutter. There are two buttons – edit, and cut. I hit cut by mistake, and I jammed on the big stop button. Right as I did it – I mean right as I did it – the power flicked twice, then everything went dark.” He looked out the window again.

Apparently, all the other kids had immediately held up their cell phones, creating a modern day lighters- at- a-rock- concert thing. And they’d directed them all at Ari, because this was entirely his fault.

“Everyone just looked at me. Then someone said the whole school was out. I killed the power to the whole school. So I left school and the power everywhere was out. So I ran home.” He double checked the lock on the door.

“Why do you keep looking out the window?” I asked him.

“Because killing the power has to put you in some kind of big trouble! Will they find me here?” I reminded him it was his home, and it might be near the top of the list for places they would indeed look for his fault.

 I wondered who he thought ‘they’ might be, and what ‘they’ might do to him. I pictured my nearly gown son running all the way home from school, much as he’d done in kindergarten when someone was chasing him. His heart was still pounding like a rabbit’s. I smiled to myself, but reassured him that it probably wasn’t him.

“Mom, you don’t understand. It was exactly as I hit the button. It had to be me. Do you get charged for that? Or something?”

I contemplated where such a charge might fall. Maybe Building a Robot Under the Influence of Dr. Pepper? Plasma Cutting With Just Your G1? Things settled down as Ari realized nobody was coming to take him away.

The next morning, our internet was out. Ari came into the kitchen as I was calling to get it sorted.

“Did you reset it? Did you bust it again?” he asked. I’ve been known to get techy when the kids aren’t around.

“No, but they said due to some massive power outage last night, the internet is down all over.” He came to a cartoon stop, the colour draining from his face.

I was kidding.

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