Heh. Quite a few years ago, I came back from vacation to find our offices (& the whole, fairly small building) completely dark. There was a sign on our office door saying “We are all working from home” and something about calling all the clients to let them know how to contact us.
I heard later: A squirrel had committed suicide by fire, taking out a transformer. The fire department had come and put out the fire by spraying water on the whole thing. There had been an impressive display of sparks, going on for a while.
We lost our whole phone system, and the insurance company declined to cover it on the grounds that there was a clause excluding “damage caused by an electric arc”.
It turned out that the big power surge was in fact on the phone cables. This was in the days of dial-up modem connections, and we only escaped losing all our computers because the modems died in the surge, isolating the computers they were plugged into.
(It would have been nice if someone had called me. I’d had to drive in, and then “we are all working from home” gave me no information whatever about what I was supposed to do at that point.)
I find it hard to believe that your knowledge of “the history of comicdom” is less than mine, and I can name several. (What’s-her-name in Non Sequitur comes to mind right off.) (Well, I can name them if I can remember the names!)
(Possibly he, like my family, finds life without a TV entirely satisfactory?)