Tony and I were watching a Blackhawks game on a recent Friday night when something unexpected happened: Half the house lost power about 9 p.m.

Weirdly, as we sat in the dark, the television hadn’t lost power and the game went on. I was happy about this because at least Tony would have something to do while I tried to figure out what was going on.

I went directly to the circuit breaker in the garage to see if this was an easy fix. Nothing looked out of place. However, I toggled all the switches back and forth just in case. No luck.

Then I went through the house to see exactly what was off. Everything but the refrigerator in the kitchen, all the lights in the living room along with the internet box, and the laundry and furnace rooms downstairs.

Since I wasn’t having any luck figuring out how to fix things, I called a friend who knows a lot about home issues. He arrived in about 30 minutes and started to assess the situation.

By 10 p.m., he had determined that one phase of our circuit breaker wasn’t getting any power and that this was a job for ComEd. Up until this point I thought the problem might have been connected to the new air-conditioning unit I had installed a couple of days earlier along with some furnace repairs. Happily, it wasn’t that.

I reported my outage on my ComEd app and waited. About 10 minutes later, I was talking to someone from ComEd.

Not that I completely understood what he was talking about. “Do you have anything that runs on 240?” he asked. Uh, what’s that? He repeated his question. All I could respond with was that my furnace wasn’t working. “Roger that,” he replied. I asked if that meant that they were coming out, and he said yes.

My friend left and gave me some instructions to help the crew when they arrived. About 11:15 p.m., two huge ComEd trucks pulled up in front of the house.

One of the guys came to the door and tried to explain what they were going to do. I think it was the same guy I had spoken with because he also only spoke electrician. “We’re going to put a jump plate in tonight, but we’ll have to come back in the morning to do a 1-to-1,” he said.

I asked him what that meant, but he just repeated himself. Then he said that I’d have power for the night, but that they’d have to turn the power off in the morning to do the repair.

Eventually, I figured out that what he meant was that they were going to put something on that night that would allow both phases of my circuit breaker to run on the side that was working. In the morning, they would get the other side working too.

A different crew returned around 8 a.m. Unfortunately, the previous night’s fix caused more problems, and they would have to figure out a permanent fix. That meant sending yet another crew. But they would be bringing a generator so that I’d have power while they worked.

One possibility was that they would have to dig up the underground line. I found out that my line goes directly under my concrete driveway as all the utilities marked their lines before ComEd did anything.

By about 10 a.m., I was told that the problem was at the base of the power pole across the street from my house. No digging up of my driveway was needed. Yay!

About an hour later, everything was fixed, and they packed up the generator and left.

Despite the anxiety created by having the power go out, I was really impressed at how they came out on a Friday night and fixed everything the next day.

Now had this happened after bad storms, no doubt I would have had to wait far longer.

• Joan Oliver is the former Northwest Herald assistant news editor. She has been associated with the Northwest Herald since 1990. She can be reached at jolivercolumn@gmail.com.