Sometimes, Timing Isn’t Everything

I have an idea that people always worry about the wrong things--the things that aren’t going to happen to them.

When I was working on the night news desk of the Honolulu Advertiser in December, 1941, a woman called the paper to ask whether she ought to go back to the mainland. She had just heard that the Hawaiian Islands were volcanic in origin and subject to earthquake, and she was worried.

A few days later the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

In Southern California we worry not only about earthquakes, but also about fire and landslides. We worry about being murdered on a freeway. We worry about the nuclear doomsday.

I have an idea, though, that most of us will die of overeating or overdrinking, or of old age.

Meanwhile, as I suggested in writing recently about a power outage at our house during one of the recent Santa Ana windstorms, I worry about a power failure. What worries me most is our failure to understand how completely our society has come to depend on our technology.

I have an idea that when the big earthquake comes, as we are assured it will, the immediate devastation will not be as bad as the aftereffects--the loss of electricity and all the services depending on it.

Don Philip of Hemet sends an article from a magazine that he unfortunately cannot identify, but it is by Page Stegner (with his father, Wallace), and it describes the younger Stegner’s attempts at coping with a power outage during a storm that devastated Santa Cruz in 1982.

In his house, everything stopped: dishwasher, freezer, refrigerator, the TV, the electrically ignited heater. The next day he went downtown to cash a check and buy some kerosene. The bank was closed (its computers down); the hardware store was closed (its electronic cash registers down); all the grocery stores were closed; so were the gas stations (no pumps).

“Don’t have anybody working here who can add and subtract,” said one merchant. “If the register doesn’t tell ‘em the right change, they’re lost.”

Stegner finally went to the university to do some letters and found a note on the secretary pool door: “NO POWER, NO SERVICE. CLOSED FOR THE DURATION.”

An inconvenience of a less drastic but more bizarre sort is recalled by Prof. Donald Ward of UCLA. It sounds “preposterous,” he says, but it is absolutely true that in 1948, because of a drought in the regions served by the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. north of the Tehachapis, thousands of Californians didn’t know what time it was.

To conserve its low hydroelectric power supply, PG&E; cut its current from 60 to 59 cycles. “The immediate result was that all electric clocks were recording 59-minute hours; and if left unattended for 24 hours, a clock would be 24 minutes behind Pacific Standard time.”

This was before battery-operated quartz watches and clocks. Only the plug-in electric clocks were reliable. “The chaos that emerged was complete. It was a lesson in how dependent we had become on rigid time schedules.” Schools and colleges did not know when the school day began and when the classes were to start and stop. Banks and other businesses did not know when to open and close; the major airports and railroad stations had access to chronometers that registered Pacific Standard Time, but the passengers did not. Telephone operators were swamped with calls for the correct time.

Prof. Ward recalls my recent exposition of attorney Alexander Pope’s suggestion that we go to a 59-minute hour, so everybody would have more time off. “Even though Pope argues convincingly that our computerized society would have little difficulty in dealing with timekeeping problems of 59-minute hours,” he says, “I fear that the plan would produce nothing but chaos. I remember the nightmare of that period all too well, and would not want to relive it.”

Fred A. Glienna of South Pasadena recalls a British television series of some years ago whose thesis was that “we are slaves to a technology that most of us do not understand, and should that technology fail, we would be civilized no longer.”

You want to know how bad it could be? For one thing, every McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Jack-in-the-Box would be shut down because none of their employees would have been taught how to add and subtract.