We were just settling down to dinner Wednesday night — the usual scenario straight out of a Norman Rockwell burst of inspiration: My wife, in her gingham apron over a comical T-shirt showing Samantha Stevens twitching her nose and instantly turning Michael Flynn into a free man, happily serving up plates of warmed-up leftover pizza.

I was seated on the couch, staring with fascination at our 129-inch Jumbo-View Television. (I remember when we got it; the screen's so large I assembled it in the front yard, flat on the ground, and a Learjet mistook it for a runway at the Groton-New London Airport and was attempting to land! Only by veering away at the last second did the pilot avert disaster, which took on a particularly spooky poignancy when we later learned the plane's passengers had been the CURRENT lineup of Lynyrd Skynyrd. THAT would have been dark.)

Anyway, as we ate, we watched the new show "Post-Mortems of the Future" — an episode where host Dr. Oz explains that, no, Mike Pence did NOT die of coronavirus but rather in an odd incident spiritualists call a "Mini-Rapture." The vice president was there one moment, scoffing at masks, and then just floated up to Paradise like a silver-haired helium balloon, turning around only once to wave goodbye.

Then, the phone rang. Not wanting to miss Big Mike's ascension, we let it go to voicemail. Turns out it was an automated call from Eversource, the power company owned by the Knights of the Golden Dawn as filtered through a confusing prism of the Trilateral Commission and the engineers behind Obamagate. The robotic voice informed us that, starting at 9 a.m. the next morning and possibly lasting several hours, our electricity might be shut off.

"Well, such things happen," I thought. If these were any other than normal times — if, for example, there was a pandemic and everyone was working from home and reliant on a power source — THAT might be such a big deal that courtesy would dictate maybe a few days' advance notice.

Oh, wait! There IS a pandemic and we ARE working from home and, yes, we DO pretty much need a power source.

But all we got was 10 hours of advance notice, so we did the smartest thing possible. We ate pie and went to sleep.

As it turned out, the Eversource truck was in front of our house for about seven minutes Thursday morning and we never lost power and, as usual, I'm making a big deal about nothing other than it COULDA been worse. For example, I envision these calls coming into the Eversource hot line:

1. "This is the Broad River Capitol Punishment Facility in South Carolina. Listen, y'all left a message about doing some work and cutting the power for a while. Hold off! We are literally right this instant just starting to electrocute someone and we're gonna need at least five minu — WAIT! Oh no!"

2. "Hi, this is, ah, the launch tower at NASA. What are you idiots doing? You can't cut the power NOW! We've got a rocket leaving for Neptune is in  five ... four ... three ..."

3. "Eversource? This is Dr. Kaisko, a neurologist at L+M Hospital. You just shut off the electricity! I'm only halfway through a spinal fusion! It's dark. Whoops! What'd I cut?"