It might have been Christmas Eve to the rest of the world, but to those of us in media it is known as the night every single piece of advertising copy must be changed. All the Christmas sales must give way to the after-Christmas sales, pre-inventory sales, or any other dodge we can think of to make you spend money before the slow months.

In my case, every single piece of copy on the Weather Channel Crawl had to be changed. All eight pieces had to be uploaded in a tedious process using a 300 baud modem -- we call it the Weather Channel torture.

I was connected online to the Weather Star 4000 and just getting ready to log in my password when it happened. All the lights were gone. No pulses, no flickers, just out and gone. I knew it was very bad because my Daddy had worked for Georgia Power Company for nearly 40 years and he had taught me to count the times that the lights dimmed. If you got three dims, you were going to be without power for awhile. Less than three dims and someone else was going to be without power for a while. It was something about the number of fuses between you and trouble. Whenever power went down without warning, it meant the trouble was either in your back yard -- or SOMETHING BIG had happened.

And it had

My first thought was, where are my keys? Here I am in pitch black in a windowless room in a windowless building and my keys are somewhere on the desk. I began to gingerly pat the desk top when I heard a click and there was dim light. A hymn of praise jumped from my heart for the good old cable company and its safety department -- we had emergency lights.

I opened the back door to the building and stepped out into what has become a very rare sight in this modern age -- total darkness. All my life there has been that yellow glow just over the horizon that is Moody Air Force Base. It was gone. The sky was deep, dark, cold, and glorious.

Completely against my will, I thought of Brad Bergstrom. Brad is the town's perennial eco-scold: as hardy and as irritating as a stand of dog fennel. A few months ago he penned a purple letter to the editor about how all of the street lights were ruining his view of the sky. I thought about Brad. I thought about him in his yard looking at this same sky and, in his Grinch of a heart, hoping that the power would never come back and that civilization would return to the good old days before man walked the earth and ruined everything for the animals.

Across town in Wood Valley, my friend Fred was in a panic. He'd been out in the yard tending to a few burned out bulbs on his Christmas display. Just as he had screwed in a bulb, all the lights in the neighborhood went out.

"Holy Moley," he shouted to his wife, " I don't know what I did, but it's pretty bad."

I'm not making this up. Fred's wife told this story on him later that night at the midnight mass at church. For a while, they didn't know if they were going to have a midnight mass. People naturally assumed that a candle lit service couldn't be held without electricity.

All over the city, people were finding out that their flashlights were broken or lost and that candles easily found by day were not so at night.

The most natural thing to do when disaster strikes is to pick up the phone, but I didn't have one. The cable powers that be decided it was better to have the phone service go away when the power went down. This way, you don't have to explain to upteem callers that the problem is not with the cable, but that the TV set requires electricity to work. Better to let the phone ring than to have to explain to customers that they are hopelessly stupid and should move to someplace like Madagascar where the technology is more their speed.

Lots of people reached for the phone. Many didn't find a dial tone. The phone company is not equipped to supply dial tones to all its customers at the very same time. Most people dialing out got busy signals anyway -- everyone they wanted to call had a phone in their hand, too.

I used the cell phone in my car. My wife was fine as we had advent candles and matches on the kitchen table. The next call went to a friend with a scanner told me that the sub station was on fire. I love a good fire so I drove out to look at it.

It was a very good fire. Not only that, but Christmas was saved because most of the power came back in just a few hours. And we all had good stories to tell at the Christmas feast the next day instead of the old boring ones about how Uncle Ed isn't passing water so well these days...

© Copyright 1997, Merrill Guice, All Rights Reserved