I was at the height of my multislacking at work yesterday when my concentration broke as I felt myself begin to shake. I looked at my desk lamp and it began to bobble its head like the Pixar lamp. I thought I would have to add “vertigo” and “hallucinations” to my symptom list for WebMD, but luckily I saw another head pop up from his cube like a jack in the box. Wait, earthquake? That’s way worse than a case of WebMD. After about 45 seconds of anti-climatic shaking, I had experienced my first earthquake and in Manhattan of all places. I made it here just in time for the biggest east coast earthquake in 67 years. I will file “fear of cityquakes” under my anxiety triggers.

The next thing I thought? Thank god I did laundry yesterday. If I’m going to have to hastily crawl under my desk in a dress it would be best if I wasn’t wearing a bikini bottom because laundry day was a week overdue. What did all my panicked colleagues do? Hopped on twitter, of course. We don’t even need the news anymore, instead of “this just in” it’s “this just tweeted”. Having celebrities confirm that what you just experienced was an earthquake is both absurd and entertaining – hey, that’s their job. Seeing how every person immediately went to twitter as a reaction to the quake, there will probably be a lot of earthquake drills in the near future.

After about 20 minutes and 1,000 tweets later, our emergency team showed up over the intercom and said “…it seems there was an earthquake and at this point in time we have it under control.” At what point do you control an earthquake, when it’s over? Thanks for controlling something that is out of your control, I appreciate that. I hope they are a little quicker on their feet when the ground isn’t moving.

I liked NYC better when all the disasters were just the people here. I’m already scared of them, the suspicious packages, subway germs, and the unidentified falling drops of water. Now I have to add earthquakes to the list. This is the last city that needs to shake things up.