Hey, thanks for the emails about my last article 2 weeks ago on the power cuts guys. I wondered how any one thing could affect cities “all around the world”. Looking at yesterday’s news from USA where 1 million people are now without power (see http://www.usatoday.com/weather/storms/story/2012-07-01/storms-power-outages/55956388/1 ) I’m wondering if maybe world areas will be hit one at a time rather than all at once. My heart goes out to those who are struggling to cope with the lack of services.
I’m not naturally a Chicken Little so that was a hard article for me to distribute.
However, almost all feedback I got was positive. Several considered me brave for daring to offer such a warning when most will not believe it. Others decided to update their emergency kit which gives me some relief. As I said before, if we don’t end up using the kit by the end of the year, we can laugh about how Mercredan got it wrong and simply use up what we stashed – it’s no lost or waste.
I noticed several people on the internet talking about large scale warnings like “The end of the world” and comparing it with the warnings of planes falling out of the sky in the year 2000 where, in the end, “nothing happened”. This is secretly an hilarious example to me and I’ll tell you why.
In 1998 I was pregnant with my first child. Obviously dancing, acting and modelling opportunities, which was my career at the time, were fairly limited for someone with a bun in the oven, so I took a contract working with an airline on their Y2K project.
The project was split into two divisions. One tested every single part of every aeroplane model owned by the company. The other division checked compliancy for all non-aeroplane gadgets. These were things the company used in their offices, airports, control towers, catering, training facilities etc. We’re talking everything here, like right down to the filter coffee machines.
Anything that failed the Y2K test, or whose compliancy couldn’t be guaranteed, needed to be either updated by the manufacturers or replaced. It was a huge project and every airline did it, sharing information with each other along the way. I believe they met in 1994 or 1995 to get these projects started (though I don’t know the exact date), so they were happening all around the world and took approximately 3-4 years, planning to finish at the end of 1998.
I understand all the airlines agreed they would not report any failings to the press as this would cause people to freak out and reduce their flying. Consequently, when the year 2000 came around, everything was well tested, replaced (and there were some BIG things that needed replacing) and as the skeptics would say “nothing happened”.
The project taught me something I’ve always remembered.
Meticulous preparation can avoid, or at least soften the blow of, possible disasters.
Power cuts and aeroplanes falling out of the sky are possible physical problems which we can prepare for physically. “End of the world as we know it” scenarios, which are generally considered spiritual world changes, need to be prepared for spiritually. And this we can talk about more in the next post.
If you want to tell me you’re not a spiritual person and don’t think it relates to your business or career, I would say don’t confuse spirituality with religion. They aren’t necessarily the same thing. And as each of us finds our spiritual side, business and career get clearer and more improved anyway, so this is not something you will want to ignore.
Stay safe and keep smiling. 🙂
Annabelle Drumm