So we had a little earthquake yesterday on the East Coast, eh?

Out in the New Jersey suburbs, toward the end of our lunch hour, a work friend and I had just sat down on a couple of stone benches on a patio next to our office building. He started bobbing his leg up and down, and then I started to feel my bench shaking. Well that’s weird, I thought. I asked him if he felt something shaking – he said no. So I figured our benches must have been resting on some loose tiles, and that’s why I could feel my bench shake while he was bobbing his leg up and down on his own bench. I felt another shake, but he was still bobbing his leg. So I didn’t think anything of it.

A couple of minutes later, a group of people started streaming out of the building. We thought maybe they were all planning to have a meeting out on the patio. Then one of them came up to us and said, “Did you guys feel any shaking out here?” I said that as a matter of fact, I had. He said they all felt the building shake and decided to come outside because it might have been an earthquake.

An earthquake! Of course, I immediately took out my phone and did a Twitter search for “earthquake.” People had felt it in New York! And in Washington! And in New England!

I had the same weird feeling I had during the 2003 blackout: slowly realizing that what you thought was a local phenomenon is being experienced by people across SEVERAL STATES.

I’m glad nobody was hurt, especially near the epicenter — which is not far from Charlottesville, my one-time home. Sounds like they felt it pretty hard at UVa, though.