Friday The 13th: A Perfect Storm

I'm not superstitious at all. Superstitions are way too impractical and quite frankly, I have enough to think about without worrying if the correct palm is itching. However, the events that transpired at rush hour this morning gave me a reason to pause. Around 7:30 this morning, a PEPCO station at 10 & G Streets stopped producing electricity(we're still not sure why). This pretty much rendered an entire power grid downtown completely useless. This included 5 METRO stations and lots of traffic lights (3 pedestrians were hit as a result).

The Dupont Circle Metro station was closed around 9:30, not because the station couldn't function without power, but because it was so bloody hot that people were literally passing out from the epic climb up the escalators. Our intern, poor guy, was unsuspectingly sent out to collect photographs this morning at the Library of Congress and came back sweaty, frustrated, and completely defeated from the public transportation nightmare. He confirmed the state of people passing out on the sidewalk through gasps from walking all the way from the U Street metro station (quite a haul). Oh, and also, there were TWO fires at Metro Center. In short, total mayhem in the Nation's Capital.

I was blissfully unaware of the chaos taking place downtown until the Friday the 13th bug hit my office. Over the course of about 45 minutes all hell broke loose. The ancient elevator in our building trapped our unfortunately sweaty and bedraggled intern and for no reason at all, a blue pen exploded ink on my hand for the second time this week.

And then my worst nightmare, the "rat truck" showed up protesting Jury's hotel. The rat truck drives around the hotel with an annoying prerecorded message telling the business merchants to boycott the hotel for bad labor practices. Only today, there was a man hanging out the window with a megaphone (competing with the prerecorded message) along with two people on the corner shouting "don't check in, check out!" It made work virtually impossible. Luckily we decided to start date night early (2 hours early) to catch the France vs. Netherlands game (more on that later

For now, I'm making sure I don't step on any cracks, or scratch any palms, or drop spoons...at least until tomorrow.