The time the power went out at uni
Power cuts. They're always a feature of modern life, and tend to spice things up for most people. Gone are pretty much everything electrical, unless it has a battery but even then, those won't last long.

This is the tale of a fairly epic power cut on my university campus.

I go to Chester university. For those who have never been, presumably thats pretty much everyone on here, Chester uni campus is very, very small compared to most university campuses (campii?). As such, there is a very friendly air about the entire place, and with all the halls of residence bar one pretty much next to each other, you get to know people very easily.

Back in the early summer of 2007, I was enjoying a spot of naked bed-wrestling in the afternoon with my then ladyfriend, to the delightful sound of Porcupine Tree playing in the background of my room, and the dull drone of the bassy soundsystem in my chavvy neighbour booming through the wall. When it all stopped. The electrical stuff, that is, not the horizontal fandango. Complaints were heard through the paper-thin walls of the adjacent rooms about the "fucking leccy going off", and suchlike.

What none of us realised at the time was that because this was a Friday afternoon bordering on evening, and because the entire university campus had gone down, it would take all weekend to fix the problem and get the entire campus back online.

I went out for dinner with the ladyfriend, came back to find the power still out, and because this was now at about 10 pm, decided to organise a corridor-wide cinema-style film viewing. Most of us had laptops with battery, but only I had the longest lasting battery and a big enough laptop (17" MacBook Pro, for those who care) that everyone could see the screen decently. As the place I was living at was split into three corridors stacked on top of each other, with my room being in the middle corridor, we invited a few people from both upstairs and the downstairs corridor to join in with our film. By 11 pm, we were all ready and all set up, having acquired supplies from the local corner shop. We decided to watch Hide and Seek with Robert De Niro and Dakota Fanning. By the time we finish, we're sat in the pitch dark, as the emergency lights have also run out of power. I've packed my laptop away, wanting to save a bit more battery on it.

This is where things start to get fun. There are about 40 of us sat in the corridor, chattering away in complete pitch darkness. Unbeknownst to us though, some of the people from the downstairs corridor have decided to sneak in with us, and are now standing near where we're all seated. Almost psychically, they all start to shout boo and moan like ghosts. All the womenfolk of the area immediately start screeching, and then everyone starts laughing maniacally.

Someone then suggests we go pay a visit to one of the other halls of residence. But that we should do it stealthily. Due to the construction of the university campus being built at different times and different parts of it being more technologically advanced than others, the halls we're planning our little raid on were locked with new fancy electronic locks, which now no longer work due to no electricity getting to them. In essence, their front door is wide open.

So we raid it. Badly. We didn't know that there were about 15 people in this tiny little hall, and our now 50 odd strong party can't actually fit in there fully. We gave up in the end, and instead decided to troop off back to our hall and settle in for the night and go to sleep, given that this is now about 4 am.

We spent the rest of the weekend in the pub, as they had drink, entertainment, but more importantly, had electricity and sources of light so none of us had to hang around in the dark. Well, we were kicked out at closing time, and then spent the night causing chaos on the pitch-black campus until we got bored. Football at 3 am with the stars being your only light is strangely fun.

By Monday lunchtime, they had fixed the lights, so we no longer got to cause chaos at night time under cover of complete darkness. Boo.

Apologies for length, its been a while since I posted.
(Ghost Atreides enjoying incontestable health benefits on, Thu 23 Jul 2009, 18:03, Reply)