‘Everything’s amazing right now

and nobody’s happy.’

— Louis C.K., comedian

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For several hours eight days ago a large portion of Vicksburg was without electrical power.

At the height of the outage, 1,972 residents and businesses were in the dark. Several major retail outlets such as Walmart had to shut their doors.

Red lights were replaced by police officers forced to direct traffic in the hot sun for hours.

More than a few complaints were heard during all of this, and we understand it’s easy to become frustrated after sitting in the dark for several hours.

However, instead of focusing on those few hours of inconvenience, might we suggest being thankful for the countless hours when electricity is at our beck and call?

Entergy and the other electric companies across the country perform a minor miracle keeping our lights on the large majority of the time.

We have all become a little too accustomed to the luxury of electricity. We have as much as we need, whenever we need it, so when something goes wrong — be it an electrical storm, equipment failure or whatever — we often forget to be patient, choosing instead to voice our displeasure to those whose only goal is to get the power back on as soon as humanly possible.

On that Saturday afternoon last week, a faulty breaker was to blame for one outage, but later a second outage was caused when a transmission power line on Cherry Street burned.

Surges from the broken line were so powerful they shattered the sidewalk and remained hot enough to crystallize the sand-based dirt below.

Let that sink in … The power running through those lines was strong enough to shatter concrete and crystallize sand!

It’s a reminder of the insane amount of power — and danger — Entergy employees deal with on a daily basis, all in the name of making sure when we flip a switch or plug on one of our many toys, that power is there to serve us.

So take the time to thank those employees for their hard work when you get the chance and be patient when faced with a few hours of inconvenience. We could all be in the dark all of the time.