While I had filled the thermos in readiness for a power cut, it was lukewarm by the time I got home to use it.
I want to be that person ready to leap out of my car, chainsaw revving, to safely clear fallen trees.
I am not quite there. I once had half-shares in a chainsaw, but in the end stopped using it because, embarrassingly, I always needed someone to start it for me.
There are some useful things in my boot — toilet paper, a brush and shovel/dustpan, a can of CRC, and a 1.5-litre bottle of water, among them.
They were not required on Thursday and I wasn’t in my car when the wind struck.
Instead, I was making my way to my daughter-in-law’s vehicle after attending the mega strike rally at the Edgar Centre.
As we got there, the howling wind (matched by my grandson who had been promised an ice cream and not convinced he would have to wait till later) thwacked down a tree in the middle of Portsmouth Dr.
My first thought? If anyone needs help, at least there are plenty of doctors, nurses and firefighters (not on strike but there in support) to deal with it.
If the situation requires a bossy teacher to use their outside voice to sort out meddlesome rubberneckers, that’s covered too.
That’s the thing about these workers. We want them to be there, ready for action, when we need them.
Not stressed out, overworked, with poor equipment, or dreadful work conditions and eyeing up their job prospects in Australia.
I was at the rally supporting the various workers struggling to make headway in their negotiations with a government which seems to be on a foolish mission to take on the public sector unions.
It talks about unions as bodies separate from their membership, accuses them of playing politics when ministers from the prime minister down are politicking as if their own generous salaries they never have to negotiate are at stake.
It even tries to foster division by encouraging lower paid workers to be indignant about the strikers’ existing pay, portrays strikers as unethical and irresponsible, and constantly urges the unions to get back to the bargaining table.
The bargaining table refrain looks questionable when we hear unions’ experience of frustrating stalling tactics rather than progress in the negotiating process.
The New Zealand Nurses Organisation talks of frequent changes in the Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora negotiating team, with new members not properly prepared.
The New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union, NZNO and the Post Primary Teachers Association all report negotiators on the other side not turning up to an agreed meeting.
The secondary teachers say when they were sorting out what mutual dates for bargaining teams were available, none were offered in October, only some in November and December.
The desperate way the government has played up Palestine as a topic on a PPTA agenda for a meeting with Education Minister Erica Stanford assumes everyone is too thick to recognise a dog-whistle when they hear one.
The meeting (which did not go ahead) was not a bargaining meeting and her office told the union discussions of terms and conditions outside the bargaining process would not be allowed.
Is it wrong for a teachers’ union to be concerned about the plight of education in war zones?
Have people forgotten that the government’s union attack dog Judith Collins, in another role as Minister of Defence, when asked about the billions of dollars for new spending on defence, said "the money will be found because it has to be found", and "it is a lot of money, but it is needed"?
Can that not apply to workers wanting pay in line with inflation or women seeking pay equity?
But back to the big wind.
Miraculously, no-one was injured by the Portsmouth Dr tree.
On the road near my daughter-in-law’s driveway, progress was stopped by another fallen tree. It wasn’t huge, but too big for us to move.
However, I could bend the branches back enough to allow her to drive past.
While she was settling my grandson, I donned high-vis, grabbed loppers and an ultra-sharp pruning saw and set off back to the tree to cut off the branches sufficiently to allow traffic through.
A man from down the road had beaten me to it, wielding his battery-operated reciprocating saw with aplomb while I and another neighbour helped drag the spent limbs off the road.
It was a small instance of the sort of practical teamwork happening around the country after Thursday’s storm. People working together quietly and sensibly for a common good.
Maybe whoever dreamed up the government’s industrial relations’ policy could learn something from that.
Less wind, more action.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
