Teen Life

(21) Teen Life

Chapter 21

System failure

Joel Campbell

“What the fuck just happened?” I yelled as anger filled me from inside. I was busy watching the cameras as usual when all of a sudden we had a complete system failure. All of the computers, the lights, and every electronic device just crapped out.

“A power outage,” Sully suggested and it took all of my restraint not to hit him over the head.

“We have a generator,” I stated as calmly as possible.

“Oh, yeah. I don’ know then,” he replied, rubbing the side of his fat head. Who the fuck hired this idiot anyway?

I chased him out of my office and phoned Mike who was working downstairs on the power system. I have never been so thankful for mobile phones before in my life.

“How’s it going?” I asked as soon as he answered. This was horrible, the last I saw was when Lainey went into the bedroom and then everything just crapped out.

“Everything seems fine, I don’t know why our system is down,” he answered, sounding confused.

“What do you mean everything is fine?”  I questioned. How the fuck can everything be fine if nothing is working?

“The power is on, the generator is working and all the cables are in place. There is nothing wrong,” he stated.

“Check again,” I ordered and hung up my phone.

“Mr. Romero is on his way,” Sully groaned as he walked into my office.

“Shit!” I complained, turning toward the main screen and punching it on the side, hoping it would somehow make it work again.

“What’s the problem?” Sully asked from behind me and I could feel myself getting angrier by the second.

“Do you honestly think I’ll be sitting here looking at a black screen if I knew what the problem was?” I yelled, turning to him. His eyes bulged in his head and he scurried out of my office.

“My computer just came back on,” Jane, a middle aged woman who was helping with the show yelled from where she sat at her desk down the hall. I turned towards my huge desk and watched as one by one the screens came back to life. I slipped back in my chair and started punching the buttons on my keyboard to see how bad our little outage had damaged our ratings. As I saw that the ratings were down with a few percent I also noticed something else. Our power was back on but we weren’t on life television anymore, our link to the broadcasters had somehow been cut.

“Were not back on yet,” I said to nobody in particular as I checked that all my setting on the computers were still right. Everything was fine, there was no reason why we shouldn’t be on air.

At that moment Mr. Romero arrived and I could hear him all the way down the hall.

“What is going on? I’m going to fire the whole lot of you!” he yelled as he approached my office. I didn’t have the time or energy to deal with him right now. I had to find out what was going on. As I made my way out of my office he came to a stop in front of me, his face as red as an over ripe tomato.