Trying to Cope Amid the Rubble : Aftermath: Most people wait for the ground to settle, then take stock the best they can. For some, it’s business as usual despite the inconveniences.

It’s not that you don’t get scared. Because you do. There is that initial jolt, the rumble and thump that makes one guy in Altadena think a low-rider with a supercharged stereo has just passed his house.

As the bass notes surge, you begin to realize that this is something far bigger, something like a roller coaster reaching its peak and, wheels creaking, starting its downward plunge: Hold your breath and wait it out.

Five burly plumbers who have been working in the basement of Plaza Pasadena since before dawn Friday do not wait. They drop their tools and stampede for the door. Outside, on Colorado Boulevard, they hold a contest to see whose hands tremble the most.

“If we could just find a bar, we’d be in there,” says Rick Horton, 37, the plumber whose knees have been doing the most knocking. “A place to cool the nerves.”

Then, as abruptly as it begins, the shaking stops. It isn’t The Big One after all. On the eighth floor of the Bank of America building in Pasadena, they sheepishly crawl out from under their desks. The power has been cut and light fixtures have plummeted, but the only injury is a rug burn on the knee of one woman who dived for cover a tad too vigorously.

Easterners dig out from snowstorms, Midwesterners from tornadoes and Southerners from hurricanes. In California, it’s earthquakes. The curious take to the streets with cameras and camcorders. They listen to radio reports on headphones. Businessmen in pin-striped suits stand outside barking orders into portable phones.

“An average Southern California earthquake,” shrugs Richard Harris, 30, manager of a Fox Photo branch in Pasadena, as he takes film from customers on the sidewalk while engineers check for structural damage in the store. “We adapt.”

What a few minutes ago seemed so terrifying really isn’t so bad. Sure, there is shattered glass at Pasadena Floral Co., where a giant 10-by-12-foot pane bearing the words, “Rose Special, $9.99 a Dozen,” once stood. Left behind on an adjacent window is the second half of the phrase: “While They Last!”

Several dozen broken bottles of booze have left a sickly sweet scent in the liquor section of the Huntington Pharmacy in San Marino. Manager George Bent, asked to talk about it, says he’d rather throw his questioner a towel and let him help clean.

But the world has not crumbled. Mostly--and there was at least one mortal exception--it is some bricks here, plaster there, a shelf of knickknacks that have tumbled. At the Bank of America building, somebody works up the courage to sneak back in the office and grab a bag of bagels and jug of orange juice. In the parking lot, under the whir of news crew helicopters, they have a party.

The same spirit grips the San Marino branch of Prudential California Realty, which has been closed to check for damage. Manager Denise Vidmar forwards all calls to another branch and tapes a sign to the wall with an important notice for her employees: The company picnic is still on today, 3 to 8 p.m.

“Business as usual,” she says.

Then there is Ludovica Aintablian. The petite, 40ish woman swears that she is terrified of earthquakes. But she needs a new cordless telephone for her small Palm Springs hotel.

Of course, the only store she knows of that carries the model she wants is in Pasadena. So she makes the two-hour drive to L.A.Tronics on Rosemead Boulevard on Friday morning.

“Didn’t you know there was an earthquake?” asks the store’s baffled vice president, Hamid Halimi, as he stands outside the cracked facade.

“I know, I know,” says Aintablian, undeterred.

He says he cannot let her into the store. She says she knows what she wants. They take her credit card, but the lines are down. Cash is out because they cannot get the register open. Finally, she writes a check in the parking lot and goes away happy.

“I was terribly scared,” Aintablian says. “But I thought, well, I have to take the chance.

“I really needed the phone.”