It was a little after four in the afternoon on Tuesday. The TV was broadcasting March Madness basketball. The stereo was playing the Rainmakers' first album. And then something popped. All the electronics hiccuped and the channel with basketball was a blank screen. Two local channels went out, but the rest of the cable was fine. I shut the TV off, put the CD back on and figured everything would be fixed soon. There would be basketball, there would be basketball, there would be basketball.

But a few minutes later, everything went down. And didn't come back. It was about 4:15 on a windy Saturday afternoon, and there was no power.

It wasn't immediately known whether or not we were the only ones who got knocked out. It's not like everything goes black when the sun still has a couple of hours of burning power left for the day. I took a little nap, but shortly after five, the power was still out. And my roommate and I had to eat. After trying to get a hold of our local pizza place (and finding that the phone wasn't connecting properly), we decided to make eggs--just in case we'd have to spend the rest of the night eating stuff out of the fridge. Because we have a gas stove, we could still cook. Eggs, tortillas and milk.

I suddenly realized that, while we had enough food, drink and candles, we were totally without entertainment. No electricity meant no sound. And, even way back at the end of last year when everyone was freaking about Y2K, I never got batteries for my portable CD player. It's one thing to be without light--the house is always well stocked with candles and oil lamps. But it's quite another to be without sound. Music helps out immeasurably with sanity in extraordinary situations. It gives everything a nice even keel--and covers up all that silence.

By that time we could tell that the street lights in our part of town weren't coming on--and we could see the flicker of candles in the windows of our neighbors. I decided a trek to 7-11--if only to adequately judge the entire situation--was in order. If the lights at 7-11 were out, we'd know it was a big blackout. If they were open, we'd buy batteries. We needed eight C batteries to run the CD player.

My roommate and I walked out of the dark house and began to notice that, at least in our neck of the woods, everyone was out of power. But a few blocks up Kathryn, the feeder street from major artery San Mateo to our neighborhood, we could see that the Dairy Queen and 7-11--which are on the other side of San Mateo--had their lights on. And there was a flurry of motor activity around those beacons of light.

When we hit San Mateo we saw the extent of the blackout. Everything on the east side of San Mateo was lit, while everyone on the west side was out. From the look of things, this continued all the way up to Zuni and down to Gibson. The 7-11 was packed with cars. Inside, the lines to check out filled the store. A quick look around, however, told us that there were no batteries to be had.

So we decided to hike up to the Raley's grocery, which was on the other side of Zuni--clearly lit from what we could see. If they didn't have batteries, there was always Wal-Mart on the other side of the street.

On the way to the grocery store, we encountered a few people who had wandered out of their house to merely check out who had lights and who didn't. And as we neared Zuni, we noticed that one street inside the blackout area was shining with lights. But the rest of the neighborhood remained in darkness.

Inside Raley's was a different scene than usual. Instead of single people or couples shopping, there were entire families. Kids were everywhere and parents were trying to keep them occupied as they stood in the long lines. Shopping uniformly consisted of at least a 12-pack of beer, chips and other non-cookable foods. Candy bars were a big item--as well as toilet paper and paper towels. It was like it was the Super Bowl all over again--except for the preponderance of Virgin Mary candles stacked in quite a few baskets.

No one was frantic--we were in a brightly lit grocery store, so obviously the world wasn't coming to an end. But everyone wanted to make sure they could make it through the night without power. And all I wanted was batteries.

We got home a half an hour later--after finding that many of the streets near Zuni in our quadrant had lights burning, but many still did not. Our house was still dark when we got home. We lit candles and lamps, loaded the CD player with batteries and put on Bob Marley.

About an hour later, a few songs into a Tom Waits CD, everything came back on. The blackout lasted about four hours. But we found out something. If Y2K actually happened, we would have been fine--although we would have had to resort to singing redemption songs ourselves.

Matt Worley spent $16.91 for an hour of music. Somehow he picked out the most expensive batteries on the planet.