Holy Christ, was that scarey!! I had just left work shortly after 4:00pm on Thursday, and we were in the elevators when suddenly everything went black!! Thank god there were only 4 of us in the elevator, but just the same, after about 10 minutes, we started getting scared and yelling for help (I work on the 15th floor). It was hotter than hell in there and we had no idea as to what had happened. We ended up taking MOST of our clothes off, because we were boiling. The one guy had his cell phone and he called his wife on her cell phone and that's when we found out that it wasn't just a problem with our building, it was very extensive. Realizing that it could be hours before anyone came for us, we all sat down but we were too tired to talk much.
To make a long story short, about an hour later we heard someone yelling down to us (the one guy had taken off the top panel in the elevator to let some air in) and realized it was either the cops or the firemen. They were considering pulling us up individually with a freakin rope around us to the next floor, but they saw that we were only about a foot off the door opening on the floor below, so they came down, pried the doors open and we got out. (yep, we had our clothes back on by this time!)
Then we all had to walk down 11 flights (actually, its 22 altogether) of stairs with flashlights (I would've thought the emergency lights would have come on but they didn't). My feet were killing me by the time we got to the bottom, I was roasting, exhausted and dying of thirst. We were without power for almost 22 hours and the entire city was black as the ace of spades. Very eerie feeling, but surprisingly very, very little looting.
What a freakin nightmare! Anyway, I'm gonna sign off now, cause they still want us to conserve energy and a computer takes alot of energy. This is the first time I've have my computer on since Thursday but I thought you'd want to hear what it was like during the 2003 Blackout!