Hurricane Hell
Today was an awful, exhausting day. I live no where near the ocean, but after today, I know what a hurricane looks like. I was at work today, I came back from my first break at 1230 and looked outside and joked with my coworkers that it looked like the sun was setting and that it looked like it was 830. Things quickly spiraled downward after that. Not even a few minutes after I got back, the lights flickered real quick. It had started to rain, just what looked like a normal heavy thunderstorm. No big deal. Like most store, our whole store front is windows. We have windows all the way down to about our forth register. One moment I turned around while talking with and checking out a customer, it was raining lightly. Not thirty seconds later the customer gasped and I turned around and the rain was pouring down. Heaviest I've seen, ever. At that point we lost power for the first time. But we stood there for a minute reassured customers we'd get up and running as quickly as possible. Two minutes later the power came back on and I was telling customers that it would only be a few minutes until the registers would come back up. They take about five minutes to completely come back up from a hard reset like that. So I went down the line pushing all the power buttons on the computers. I didn't even make it down to register four before the power went out again. We stood in the dark for a moment and all of a sudden we looked outside and it was BLACK. The rain was falling so hard you couldn't see past the first car in the parking lot. We rushed all the customers to the front of the store to keep them all together. We could see the trees being torn apart, and the light poles in the parking lot swaying. At this point I jumped into action. I was the top coordinator in the store and there was no manager, so I was the only one who knew what the disaster plan was. The city turned on the tornado sirens even though there was no tornadoes because the winds were steady at 80 miles an hour for the next 45 minutes to and hour. I immediately got everyones attention and told them to calmly follow me and the associate with a flash light to the safe zone. As the stragglers were lining up in the hallway by our bathrooms and in our back room, one of my coworkers told us over our walkies that you could hear the roof ripping off over the shoes section. For about 45 minutes we were able to keep everyone in the back of the store and safe. After that though, curious people began wondering to look the massive hurricane like storm. I had to ask several people to move away from the windows several times. After almost two hours of no power the storm had calmed down. It was still raining and there was lightning, but we let most the customers leave. At this point we began to put everyones things on hold, because we had no idea when our power was coming back on. Our service desk was full of holds. We ran out of hold cards. It was insane. We had one customer who would not leave until the rain virtually stopped. Our whole city looks like a disaster zone. And our power cut off and on about four more times before I went home. It was one hell of a day.
