San Francisco lacks fortitude, wins on cooperation

So it rained today in San Francisco. Where I live, on the days it doesn’t rain, it snows, or it ices and slushes with a slime that’s already dirty before it oozes onto cars and eyebrows. In San Francisco we got a nice warm pitter patter rain… and they shut down the whole town. Schools and offices were closed. I had to park on 101 for an hour waiting for someone to get the nerve to drive around a puddle. I MISSED MY MEETINGS.

There was a huge media buildup to this rainstorm. The weather people went crazy on TV, radio, Web, and print telling people to stay home. Then, morning dawned gray and gloomy. It was like the beginning of a disaster movie. I was making fun of it with my wife, wondering if suddenly Magneto would appear, short out the transformers, and rip out the Golden Gate Bridge.

Then, the power went out. Power was out for most of the day for the central neighborhoods of San Francisco. Magneto, you win.

The population of San Francisco may lack perspective when dealing with strange liquids falling from the sky. However, they are very nice people. I have always said that people are fundamentally cooperative, not the survival-of-the-fittest demons that philosophers have made them out to be. That was proved by the way traffic moved through the center of the city at rush hour, 8:30 am, with no traffic lights. People were waiting and oozing considerately through intersections, which is not remotely like what you would normally get in my home town of Boston.