Batteries For Emergency

There wasn’t a moment that went by where the Cat didn’t think about the battery levels in his emergency flashlight. It was at the forefront of her mind day-in and day-out.

Why, you ask? Well, the Cat had been told her whole life: “Be prepared! Be prepared! Be…(you guessed it)… Prepared!”

This lesson was drilled into the Cat by every authority figure in her life. Over and over and over again she heard—

“Be Prepared, Murlene! You never know what could happen!” Her teachers would say in class.

“Be Prepared, Murlene! You can never ever be too prepared!” Her coaches would say at soccer practice

“Be Prepared, Murlene! And by the way, I see that bag of Halloween candy you’re buying - don’t eat too much of it all at once unless you want me filling in more cavities for you!” Her dentist would say when he bumped into her at the grocery store and didn’t know how to mind his own business.

So Murlene always made a point to be totally prepared, for anything, 100%. What kind of Cat would she be if she didn’t listen to what others told her?

One day the power went out in Murlene’s house. The moment the lights went out Murlene remembered not feeling any panic at all. She was prepared. She knew where her emergency kit was and she know exactly how to get to it from any point in the house. She had even run simulations testing her ability to retrieve her emergency kit from any point in the house, in the dark. You know, just in case…

The night the power went out Murlene made her way to her emergency kit with ease and then reached in to grab her flashlight. When she went to turn the flashlight on, it was dead.

The panic Murlene had totally skipped when the power first went out came rushing into her with a vengeance. She was not prepared for this. The one thing she had been told, unequivocally, her whole life, she had not done. She was not prepared for this. What a bummer.

The lights came back on almost immediately that night but it was enough to make Murlene have a very deep and very situationally specific realization — no matter how thoroughly and meticulously you plan for an emergency there is always the possibility that the batteries could be dead in the flashlight.