In honor of that huge geographical electrical outage ten years ago this weekend, here’s a throw back to a Better Investing column I wrote at the time.

“Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink.”

Alex, our 13-year-old, and I were returning from a couple of days of camping and canoeing in northern Michigan. About 90 minutes from home, I decided to check in with my spouse. “All circuits are busy. Please try your call again later.” For me,“later” is approximately five seconds whenever I encounter that message. So I tried again. “All circuits are busy.” It became obvious that something was amiss because I continued to redial every 5 to 10 minutes for nearly two hours. “All circuits are busy.”

“All circuits are busy.”

We rolled into town to find all the traffic lights out of service, with the expected gridlock. A five-minute spin across town turned into…