What Else Happened on New Years Eve

About an hour before Javert and I were to go to his office for New Years Eve, we were watching tv and making dinner when the lights started to flicker. A lot. Like, we-are-in-a-horror-movie type of flickering.

Typical New Yorkers that we are (aspire to be?), we looked out the window and saw the apartment building next-door to us also had flickering lights. So Javert called Con-Ed. As you may have suspected, Con-Ed told us they hadn't gotten any other reports (impossible!) and promised to alert their "emergency" division, which means they promised to send someone out in the next year or so. As Javert was on the phone, we heard a lot of sirens, and after hanging up with Con-Ed he went down to see if they were coming from our block. I had to stay upstairs to finish dinner and also corral the cats into cages should it turn out to be an actual emergency.

Which, thank goodness, it wasn't. At least not for us. The building two doors down from us had been evacuated due to an electrical problem (Hello? Con-Ed??), and thats why our lights were flickering like crazy. There were at least 5 fire trucks outside (but no fire that we could tell) and an ambulance, and a big hole in the street with tons of steam pouring out, and the whole thing was very creepy (New Years Eve + Lights Flickering + Sirens = Apocalypse?) but the lights went back to normal before we left home.

As predicted, Con-Ed emergency called the next day, which means that if it had been a real emergency, we'd have been dead.