October 28

When I went down to my car Thursday after work, I discovered the battery was dead. I had left my lights on all day. Oops! The problem of finding someone to help me was multiplied twofold as it was not only another strike day, it was also school vacation and many of the people who were not on strike had taken a vacation day to hang out with their kids. Apparently there had been an announcement on the intranet service about a car with its lights on, but I don't get it and noone thought to mention it (why would they?). A colleague started phoning around and we eventually found a woman with jumper cables in her car. The woman, her grown daughter and another male colleague came down to help me. We didn't have much success, however. My battery is mounted strangely and we couldn't get the clamp to fit in the right place. So after all of that, I ended up having to call my insurance for roadside assistance. The guy came out within thirty to forty minutes and got me back up and running. I came up with a plan to go home and make cookies for the colleagues who had tried to help me.
I called Sylvain to let him know I was on my way home and he told me there was an electricity problem at the house. So much for my great cookie-making plan. There was no light and only four or five outlets were working in the whole house. Funnily, or luckily, the ones working were the ones where the TV and modem are plugged in! So we basically had no electricity, but we did have TV and internet!! When I got home (more than an hour late, around six-thirty), I took a look around (our place, Marie-Elisabeth and David's place, and the kitchen addition) and discovered that it wasn't a problem with our circuit boxes. We called a friend who came out and figured out that is must be an electrical problem outside the house. Then he and Sylvain went to track down another friend who works for EDF, the electricity company, who called a friend of his in the emergency maintenance service. So instead of having to wait four hours for a repairman (the standard wait, apparently), he came out within an hour. It turned out that the outside electrical box that controls our house had blown and had to be completely replaced. This provided the solution for another electrical mystery. The two nights previous, from around five to six am each night, the electricity had kept jumping on and off or browning in and out. I guess those were symptoms of the box's increasing illness. We were completely without electricty for about an hour while the box was being replaced, so I lit a bunch of candles and sat around in the dark (Sylvain was outside with our friend and the repairman). I was exhausted after dealing with my evening of problems!