Or not so secretly.
A few years back, we had water pouring into the basement where I work, and there was danger of that shorting out the mains, so FD cut the power to the whole building. Of course, it was still morning, and the company wasn’t about to send everyone home if the power might be back on in an hour or two, so we were kinda stranded at work ’til either quitting time or ’til the power’d be flicked back on.
Wellp, the Pb-acid powered emergency lights did an admirable job lighting up the hallways… for a coupla hours. Then, it was black. No windows, no glimmer of light from the outside, nothing.
Back then, I was the only one who had any flashlight at all, my 2×AA modded Taskforce light. Everyone had his paw out wanting to borrow my light to go to the can down the hallway, and nfw was I going to let anyone take my light in there and sully it. I was amazed, that in a company full of techies, not a single one had ANY light.
Seriously, I want another blackout, just to be able to light up the whole hallway with 1000lm of goodness.
(Even our IT dept, NO ONE has a flashlight. They borrowed mine to look into a drop-ceiling a week or so ago. I pointed ’em at a few lights I have but no longer use, either to buy for the dep’t or personally, practically half what I paid for ’em, or was willing to point ’em to a supplier if they wanted new. Not a word. Just crickets in the background.)
I want blackness. Darkness. Citywide, middle of winter, sundown at 16:30 dark by 17:00, black. That’ll learn ’em…