Don't Leave Home Without It

Thursday morning, April 9, 6:15 am. Rhumba and I were getting out of bed to face yet another low-wage day shuffling paper, when she turned to me with an interesting proposition:

"Caff," Rhumba said. It was a light, sharp cough. "Caff, I say!"

We call it the Madame Bovary cough: delicate, mannerly, fake. It means one intends to feign illness on a workday. I raised an eyebrow.

"I'm calling in sick," Rhumba confirmed. "Nothing's happening at work. And I've got things to do around here. Do you want to call in sick, too?"

I thought about it. I'm a Boy Scout at heart, forever earning imaginary merit badges for good behavior. But... the boss was out of town. I had about three weeks of sick time piled up. And after last week's layoff, the office was as quiet as a tomb. Layoffs tend to kill personal initiative in the short term.

"Caff," I said. "Caff! Caff! I'll get a shower and call in. Then we can go out for some breakfast."

Rhumba padded into the spare bedroom, where the computers live, to do something to one of her insanely complicated websites. I took the shower, suited up, and phoned work.

But I couldn't open my voicemail; the voice prompts were different than usual, and they took me through a weird series of commands that repeated themselves without ever leading anywhere. I couldn't even change my greeting message.

I finally succeeded in leaving an I'm-sick message in someone else's mailbox, but even that was a struggle.

"Something's wrong with the voicemail at work," I told Rhumba.

"The Internet's down, too," she said, looking at the network router as if it had personally insulted her. There followed several minutes of cable-swapping, but to no avail.

"I guess the ISP is down," she said. "It happens. I'm going downstairs."

She left, but I hovered over the computer. Rhumba is three times the techie I am, but being a male I just knew that she hadn't tested every possible line. There had to be a bad one somewhere in that rat's nest of cabling. I reached for the first plug...

"Stop!" Rhumba burst back into the room. "TV says the Internet's down!"

And most of the phones, too, in Santa Cruz and southern Santa Clara County. Our phones still had dial tone, but that explained the screwy voicemail at work; AT&T is our voicemail service provider.

We hovered around the TV for a bit and got what details we could: dark tales of cut cables deep within in South Bay manholes; rumors of dead cell phone reception, failure of the 911 emergency service. And even though our phone worked, we probably couldn't call out of the local area. Nasty.

So -- we drove off to breakfast. Had a few bucks in my pocket and a debit card. That should work. Why shouldn't it be a normal day?

And about four blocks from the house, the car radio told us, "All credit card systems are down throughout the area." Oopsy. Debit cards use the credit card system.

"Maybe they have one of the old manual card readers at the diner," I said tentatively.

"Maybe," Rhumba echoed.

"But... maybe we should..."

"Hit the ATM," Rhumba finished.

I wheeled the car around and drove to our local branch of Bank of the Women. We call it that because the staff is all female except for a vestigial male manager who sits in the corner office and never comes out.

But when we got there, the ATM displays read "OUT OF SERVICE." And though bank hours hadn't even started yet, the vestigial manager actually emerged from the building to address a small crowd of customers that had gathered outside.

"All ATMs in the area are down, and probably will be down until at least noon," he announced. "The Internet's out all the way to San Francisco. We can't connect to the data center."

"Can we take out cash when you open?" somebody asked.

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe not."

"Oh jeez," I said to Rhumba. "I guess we're heading home for emergency cash."

I keep a few hundred bucks in bills around the house against the day the banking system shuts down because of some catastrophic global financial reset and all the pretty plastic cards stop working for a day, or a week, or more. And while such precautions may place a tinfoil propeller beanie on my head in your eyes, I never, ever imagined that somebody could close the banks and shut down the credit card system and the ATMs for three million people -- with a pair of cable-cutters.

I grabbed -- well, enough money for any likely eventuality. When I was a kid back in the '70s, nobody would trust an 18-year-old with plastic or even take his check unless they knew him personally or he lived close by. So I carried a couple of hundred with me whenever I left town, even for simple day trips. (I was a saver even then, okay?) And suddenly, it was 35 years ago again.

And off we went to the diner, where the baby-faced waitress was reassuring but under-informed.

"Yes, the credit card system isn't working," she said. "But don't worry, we have this old machine that we can run them through."

"Good. And the ATMs are down too, you know."

"Really?" Her eyes widened.

"Yeah. And the Internet, and a lot of the telephones, and most of the cellphones."

"Really?" I was describing her doomsday scenario.

"Yep. Think of all those college students roaming around out there with two bucks in their pocket, an ATM card that doesn't work, and a dead cell phone."

"Chaos..." she breathed, eyes like saucers. I really should be kinder to the young.

Breakfast was breakfast. They would have taken our debit cards, but we paid cash and got bigger-than-usual smiles for our trouble.

But when we stopped in at a store afterwards to pick up a couple of things, there was no choice: they were taking cash only. And things were slow. While we were there, one customer had to leave her items at the counter because she had no greenbacks -- just useless plastic.

Across Santa Cruz, some businesses took only cash; some struggled with old-fashioned card readers; and some just closed. The big chain food stores with state-of-the-art cashiering systems let people swipe their cards as usual; their systems simply stored all the transactions electronically against the time that the Internet became accessible again; then they would submit them all in one large batch.

But they were the exceptions. It was hard for business to get done. Almost all money is electronic. Nobody carries cash, and the banks couldn't even dispense cash because they couldn't reach their data centers to okay the transactions. All because of a few cut cables.

I was here in Santa Cruz in '89 for the Loma Prieta Quake. All the electricity was down for a day and a half. But before long, business got done. People bought food and water and what batteries they could find. Stores scrounged up gasoline generators to run their cash registers, and people brought their cash. Or checks, because in those days some stores issued check cards to trustworthy customers that told the cashiers, "It's okay to take this guy's check."

But people don't carry much cash now, because we can use plastic for the smallest purchases, and get cash just as we need it 24/7 from ATMs. And we don't need check cards, because most people don't write checks and anyway there's also an electronic network for verifying checks.... which was also down.

We made it through one day. Two? I don't know. Even the big markets, with their ability to electronically store transactions, might start to balk after a couple of days. In recent years electronic-base commerce has made our financial system very efficient -- but also very ephemeral and very, very fragile. Most of us didn't know how fragile it was. Until somebody cut a few cables. Just a few.

And we didn't even have to lose electricity.

Rhumba and I went home, sat tight, and did stuff. Every once in awhile, listening to the latest news on the radio, I thought about getting on the Internet to get more details on what they were talking about. But there was no Internet. No texting or twittering or commenting or browsing. Just TV and news radio, as if it were 20 years ago.

Eventually the radio said that repair crews had reconnected the first of the several cut cables. I'll bet they got the Internet up first, I thought. And I flipped on the modem and router, and our little net made contact with the ISP. And all of you were there again.

And I'm glad you're there. And I hope you stay.

But I'm beefing up my emergency cash stash.