I had an electrifying experience recently. The day started like any other. The day started with a yawn and then a stretch and then the work of dragging myself out of bed in the morning for another day of work. I am sure my mind was conditioned for another humdrum day.

Walking in the door of the office I greeted my co-worker. She was all smiles anticipating another humdrum day. I continued on to my work area. I settled into my chair by a window, turned on my computers and wistfully gazed out the window at the beautiful sky.

All of sudden there was a crash against the side of the building. The sky was falling, the sky was falling! I rushed to the front of the office to inform my co-worker that the sky was falling and it was hitting my window. She didn’t believe me and escorted me back up the stairs. Was this the way Chicken Little felt when he was trying to warn everyone that the sky was falling and no one believed him?

We tentatively opened the back door. There was construction on the building next door and things were flying off the roof left and right and hitting our building and my window. The sky was falling! I was right. However it was a man-made falling. We quickly closed the door to get out of the way of falling debris.

I immediately moved my workspace away from the window should the sky decide it wanted to move inside. Work continued.

Do you remember the professor on the clock tower in the movie “Back to the Future”? Do you remember lightening bolts hitting the tower and the sizzle and the flashing? We were hard at work and it happened. We were in “Back to the Future” and we were on the tower and everything was sizzling and flashing! I know how the professor felt. Something had hit our power lines and we were in “Back to the Future.”

After the sizzling finished there was dead silence. We heard no workers. We were afraid to open the door as it was a steel door and we were not sure where the downed power lines were laying. Fear set in. Would we find someone had been hurt during the sizzling? Luckily there were no casualties except for equipment in our office that had not liked the sizzling.

Our humdrum day was no longer humdrum. We were reminded that in a flash our lives could change. We weren’t hurt but when the flashing was happening we weren’t sure whether to run, stay still or who to call. “Call the fire department! No, call the utilities!” We couldn’t find the phone book. We couldn’t move. We stood there waiting for the flashing to stop. We could not think fast enough to know how to protect ourselves had the danger been more severe. We didn’t have a plan.

We took the safety of our office for granted. We had a tornado plan. It is “do not stay in this building, hide at the bank.” We have a flood plan. It is “do not stay in this building, find a boat.” We have a boss is in a bad mood plan. It is “give him candy.” But we had no “lightning struck, ‘Back to the Future’ tower plan.”

The rest of the afternoon I would jump when the sky started falling again and something hit our building. In spite of the fact that I knew what was happening the reflex of flight was there. We kept expecting new flashing. We kept expecting to be the professor again as lightening was hitting the tower.

What kind of day do you think you are going to have when you wake up in the morning? Are you prepared for the humdrum day to turn into a spectacular flashing spectacle? It can happen. We can be as careful as we can be. I am sure the construction workers next door did not expect to turn our day into a “Back to the Future” spectacle. All my co-worker and I did was to be present in a building that was affected by accidents that were caused by other people. It changed our day from humdrum to excitement and fear.

The truth is that we were prepared for a humdrum day. We were not prepared for an emergency. We had no emergency numbers posted. We had no plan. All we had was indecision and legs that would not move. We expected to be safe and we were, but had the outcome been different, we might have been more prepared had we planned for days that change from humdrum to electrifying.

We can’t plan for everything but we can be prepared for changes that we don’t expect. The same electrifying day, later in the afternoon, we were prepared for the next emergency. Little did the bat hanging outside our door scaring our customers know that because of “Back to the Future” we had a plan for him. The tennis racket hangs on our wall as art until it is needed for a bat emergency.

Wells resident Julie Seedorf’s column appears every Monday. E-mail her at thecolumn@bevcomm.net.