Rivanta ad: If you're a parent or grandparent, please read this 👆

The Red Cross brought cots and water and blankets. A woman named Verna brought a power strip. This was the flood in '19. Four hundred and some people in a high school gymnasium, most of them with nothing but what they grabbed, and the thing about a shelter that nobody tells you beforehand is how much of it is just waiting. You wait for lists. You wait for word about roads. You wait to find out about your house, which nobody can tell you anything about, because nobody has been down there yet. The organization was fine. I want to be fair about that. There were cots and there was food and there were people working eighteen-hour days who did not have to be there. But there were two working outlets in that gym and four hundred people with dead phones. Verna was sixty-something. Retired. She'd come in on the second night with her daughter and by the third morning she had taped an orange extension cord down the length of the west wall with duct tape she'd gotten from somewhere and set out three power strips at the end of it. That's the whole innovation. An extension cord and three power strips. What happened next is the part I still think about. A line formed. Not a pushy one — a shelter line, the slow kind, people holding a phone and a charger and their place. And Verna sat on a folding chair next to the strips for eleven hours a day, for six days, and did one job: she made sure everybody got a turn. She had a system. Twenty minutes was enough to make a call. Twenty minutes, then unplug it, then the next person, and she kept it in her head, no list, no timer. If somebody's phone was at four percent and they were shaking she moved them up and nobody argued about it because it was obviously right. She told people to go outside to make the call. Better signal by the parking lot, she said. Come back in, plug in again if you need to. I watched a man in his fifties get twenty minutes, walk outside, come back in, and sit down on the floor against the wall and put his hands over his face. His mother was alive. She was in a shelter forty miles the other direction. He had not known for three days. Verna had already moved on to the next person. She never watched people take the calls. I noticed that. I think she thought it wasn't hers to look at. By the fifth day people were bringing her coffee she didn't ask for. Somebody's kid drew her something. She put it in her bag. On the last day the news came through and did a piece on the shelter and interviewed a man from the county, and Verna was thirty feet behind him in the shot, sitting on her folding chair next to an orange extension cord, not in the story at all. Here's the product, and here's the honest problem with putting it in this story. It's a power bank with a solar panel on the face of it. Sun on the panel, charge in the battery, battery into your phone. That's it. Nothing hidden in there. Verna did what she did with twelve dollars of hardware store plastic and forty feet of cord and six days of sitting in a chair. She didn't need what we sell. She didn't need anything we sell. Most of what mattered in that gymnasium didn't plug into anything at all — it was one person deciding to run a small fair system so that four hundred frightened people could each get twenty minutes. Nobody here is going to promise you a transformation, and I'm not going to tell you this would have made that week better. A woman in a folding chair made that week better. If you want to look at the thing anyway: 👉 https://tryrivanta.com/products/powerbank There's no rush on it. P.S. — I looked her up two years later to see if she was alright. She was. She had no idea anybody remembered. She said, and I wrote it down, "it was a power strip, honey." Somebody organizing a fair line so strangers can each get twenty minutes is older than any product and it's the best thing in this ad. P.P.S. — The specification, flatly, since somebody always asks. Power bank, solar panel across the front face. Flashlight in one end, compass on the shell. Survives being dropped, doesn't mind rain. Sits in a drawer for a couple of years and holds what it's holding. Around fifty dollars. That's the whole story. P.P.P.S. — 90-day money-back guarantee. So you know you can send it back. Not a reason to hurry.