Horntoad said:I thought I broke it. After I spent the last of my tickets, I started watching what everyone else was doing, But there were no new dibs after mine. I keep watching and watching but nothing.
Jay -
YOU BROKE IT!!!
At the very instant the Great New England Blackout started, a young kid was walking along a picket fence with a stick, dragging the stick across the pickets to make an annoying noise.
He came to a telephone pole, wound up, and gave that pole a good whack with his stick.
EVERY light in sight went out!
He went home in panic to find out that he had just taken down the ENTIRE Northeast power grid: from space it looked like someone had spilled copious amounts of black paint over that part of the continent.
(It was actually caused by a software defect: one changed line in an assembler program that was such a "trivial" fix that they had not bothered to verify and test it as they do "real" changes. It caused one "burp" by one switching station take down the next station. That wouldn't have been so bad, but it was a consistent and reliable defect, so it brought down EVERY switching station connected to any other station. Not sure how they limited it to "just" the Northeast. )
