Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for January 26, 2021

Now days you pay for the line, not the number of call’s

Be careful in the dark! Don’t trip over the dead squirrel!

Come on now, Arlo, that’s crazy talk !

You can also charge you phone with your car’s power outlet… Or you could just look out the window to check the power.

How close are the houses? If they’re close enough he could just make a window to window call.

Should not be a problem.

The neighbors door bell is powerless, too. And so are their automatic window blinds. And their cctv system.

Hold on a minute there, Arlo. Maybe it’s the long term lockdown but try to keep it together and not go nuts now.

I just walk out front and check the street lights if it is dark enough. Nowadays our power company has an app where I can report outages and see what has been reported, and even an ETR if it has been worked for a while.

I love to WALK.

Hey! Colorist! Read yesterday’s strip, and the dialog!

Why not simply while away the weary hours? >:-D

Now there’s a radical idea.

I am now officially old. Seeing a plural pronoun with a singular noun bugs the hell out of me.

I was in a RV park once when the power went out. Sure enough, there was a woman going from site to site asking people if their power was also out.

Good for Arlo! Here on the Gulf Coast, it’s amazing how many neighbors you get to know after a hurricane and a prolonged power outage. After Ivan many moons ago and without power and water for two weeks, our next door neighbor got to know us too well because we were getting buckets of water from his pool to flush the toilets.

If you go next door….socially distance

When people text across the dinner table, you KNOW the art of conversation is lost. In my house, no electronics at the dinner table.

Looks like the power is back on to me! ;o]

This is why I have a backup battery. (for phones, pads, etc)

How very pioneering of you, Arlo! ☺

It is funny that this exact scenario was part of why the original land lines provided the power to support the call independent of the local power grid.

Considering that was an afterthought, I’m guessing they don’t see the neighbors very often.

I would get up and turn the tv on instead of using the remote, but they hid the button.

Hey Arlo, Why don’t you have a generator?

Last time I was in an area with major power cut – the mobile network died within a couple of hours so not a lot of point worrying about phone battery. But if they hadn’t died then I had a car with plenty of fuel in it that I could have recharged it from.

If this isn’t the perfect example of a first world problem, I don’t know what is. <ka-SNICK!>

Covid! dont go next door!!!!

sometimes power outages are the times when neighbors chat the most.

5 minute walk down the driveway or call the wife or husband next door on the cell phones but they’re probably at work. He could use his phone to connect with his power company using their app. If he’s really in danger of using up his phone’s power, use it to call his son and have his son check it out on his computer. Yes, I’ve done that.

WHAT?!? What are you, some kind of Luddite zealot?!?

Walk?!? Mind blown…

All you have to do is look out a window. If there are no flickering blue lights in the neighbors’ windows, then the TVs are off and the power went out.

What a brilliant idea! Just like we did in the olden days! Okay it was last year but I went next door and hung out there until the power came back on. (It was before the pandemic.)

Duh huh!

When we have a situation – as we have had since yesterday and continues to at least tomorrow due to heavy snow and wind storm – in which we might lose our electricity husband goes crazy. If it is, as now. it is cold weather it is even worse, as he envisions not only losing our electricity, but since our furnace needs same – losing our heat, which will also lead to our water pipes freezing and bursting.

So to reassure him we keep every laptop computer and every cell phone plugged in continually.

We now have the added fear that our traditional house phone line had to be converted from the original copper wire lines – which need only their own electricity, not our our electric company’s electricity to work – to fiber optic. We have one day’s worth of battery backup and then we have to have batteries to replace same for another day and so on. The backup takes 12 D batteries – not cheap to buy or compact to store a lot of them in the house. (Also the service with it is terrible, but it was switch or only be able to call/receive calls from the phone co and 911.) When electric lines go out here from a storm it is not uncommon for them to be out for at least 4 days – after Isaias they were out for some areas (luckily not ours) for about two weeks – after Sandy for over a month in some places. I once telephoned the electric company to report an outage (with no storms for weeks before or after) and explained to the employee that this was the second outage in less than a week – I got an “uh huh”. He then entered in the info I gave him and informed me (as if I had not mentioned it) “this is your second outage in a week”.