Call us slow, but the attitudes never changed here, even after the May 3rd 1999 tornadoes. (The story I related was in 2001).

Around here, we just like to think we've figured out how to discern the real ones from the hype. Hubris, I suppose.

My Grandma called me last night about 9:00 and asked me if we had felt the earthquake just then. Seeing as how we're 170 miles away, we obviously had not. She apparently thought it was bigger initially than it actually was. She had just fallen asleep and was awakened with a feeling similar to vertigo. When she tried to stand up, she just about fell down, again thinking she was just dizzy.

I was also living in the Bay area during the 1989 quake. I was leaning back in a chair, pretending to do some homework and waiting for the baseball game to come on when suddenly I found myself lying flat on my back looking at the ceiling. My first thought was "I'm going to kill him", meaning my brother who I thought pulled the chair out from under me. Then I noticed lights swinging and bookcases falling. A very sureal feeling, to say the least. I wasn't a bit panicked, as I had no idea how serious it really was, being 50+ miles from the epicenter.

I was working in a Semiconductor Fab in Taiwan during a big earthquake (and during a typhoon as well but I'll tell that story when someone starts a thread about typhoons). When the earthquake happened, the building swayed like a tree in the wind (at least it seemed that way to me). Some girl came on the intercom and started rattling stuff off in rapid-fire Chinese. I have "get around town" Chinese skills but I couldn't understand a word that girl was saying because she was talking so dang fast. A bunch of people started running hither and thither but the engineers I was with just acted like it was no big deal (they did tell me to move away from the window).

It turns out that the "hither and thither" people were running to make sure equipment calibrations hadn't changed and to make sure there were no toxic gas or acid leaks. Everyone else was business as normal. I'm assuming someone would have told us to evacuate had there been a serious toxic leak (semiconductor manufacturing can involve some seriously toxic chemicals).