BLACK OUT is NO CAKE

So yesterday @ work..yes, the lovely J.CREW 3rd St. Promenade, it was a lovely sunny day out. As the afternoon reached high noon and quickly to 1pm, I decide to go turn on the steamer for my other manager who need to steam out his linen blazer. I turn it on and *BOOM* the lights go out in the entire store and inside I'm going, "Holy flippin god.. I hope that wasn't me!" I looked across the Promenade I saw that Restoration Hardware had lighting so I kept thinkin, "Was it me?!?!"

Having gone over the "emergency procedures" with the other managers at our previous meetings, I grabbed the flashlights and rallied all of the associates in the store and escorted all the customers out and locked the store. The other manager had gone to BR to go shop the fall sale so I was left to hold down the fort. What is a girl to do when her shop goes black? Here's the play by play.

1. Go to the office upstairs and grab my cell phone to call the store manager, and continuing down the hiearchy, call our district manager and some other peeps.
2. Pull out the ancient "no electricity needed" phone outta the dusty cabinet and plug it in to use in case people need to call in.
3. Send associates out on the promenade to see if this blackout was solely us...thank god the blackout affect neighboring businesses on our side of the block and 342 other customers in the area (statistics provided by Edison Power).
4. Fold and fill the selling floor with new stock inventory cuz we were still getting paid to work.
5. maintain my cool. Cool as a cucumber.
6. 90 minutes later, the power went on and business went on as usual.
7. Good to know, the blackout wasn't because of me. WHEW!