Kinesis marketing and design blog

We were dead in the water yesterday when a major power outage left much of downtown Portland, including the Kinesis office, in the dark. A power station caught fire leaving 1,900 Pacific Power customers without electricity for hours on Thursday (click here for the full scoop).

Without electricity to power our computers, there isn’t much for the designers to do in the office. We heard a rumor that power would be back up around 3pm. But, what to do for half a day? Well, much wasn’t going to get done in the office, so two of our designers, Jade and Michelle grabbed the camera and took to the street, wanting to see the extent of the damage.

The logical place to spend loads of time is right across the street at Powell’s Books, however they were in the same boat we were. No power!

So, the designers started walking:

They were striking out. Hearing that there was still power closer toward the river, they made their way to Borders on 3rd…hoping beyond all hope that the bookstore would be open. They lucked out.

After trekking back to the office to see if the power had come back on, they started getting hungry. So it was about time to go search for some grub. Kenny & Zuke’s Deli on SW 11th and Stark was still cooking up lunch despite the power loss. Their delicious turkey sandwiches and good beer really hit the spot.

It was quite an abnormal Thursday for many of the businesses in downtown Portland. In our office, the power finally came back on around 2. Whew! We still had half a day to get back to the monitors! Unfortunately, many businesses were hurt by this event, KXL NewsRadio reported:

The outage also affected the Widmer Brothers Brewing Company. Brewers had to dump a batch of beer because of the power loss.

“This is our new Dead Lift Imperial IPA. It’s the most expensive beer that we do. And that makes it painful. I did the math. It’s 62,000 pints of beer or would have become 62,000 pints of beer,” said Rob Widmer.

That kind of things hurts. Kinesis was slowed down for a day, but sometimes a jumpstart out of the routine is a good thing.

“Thanks for the fun day Portland, we should play again soon…but next time WITH power so we can actually visit all those closed businesses.”