I understand that Hurricane Sandy was devastating to untold numbers, and I don’t mean to make light of their situation at all, but here’s the account of someone who basically just got a long vacation out of it:

I spent last weekend in Pittsburgh with freaky Internet strangers Cassie and Jessica, and we knew the hurricane was going to hit this week, but we all expected it to be a Hurricane Irene situation where everyone filled their bathtubs with water and bought eighteen cans of Pringles and then felt shame the next day when we barely got a rainshower.

It started seeming a little more serious on Sunday morning when Cassie burst into the hotel room I was sharing with Jessica and warned me that I might want to try to bump up my flight home. And then they announced that the subways and buses would stop running at 7 p.m. and that my office was in the flood zone and would be closed Monday.

Of course nothing happened on Sunday night, so Kamran and I ordered one of our favorite dinners and stayed up all night watching horror movies in anticipation of Halloween and eating the baked goods Cassie had bought for me from Pittsburgh’s Oakmont Bakery.

Nothing was happening still on Monday morning, and we chided the city for making such a deal about nothing once again as we ordered lunch from one of the many restaurants that were still open despite the public transportation closures. We caught up on our of our DVRed shows, napped, and answered texts from worried friends and family who were hearing melodramatic/completely false accounts of how the city was crumbling.

We went down to the lobby of Kamran’s building at 5 that afternoon to check the mail and saw that the little convenience store inside his building was completely wiped out. There was also a sign on the elevators telling us to limit our use after 7 p.m. in case the electricity went out, so we decided to go ahead and order dinner to make sure it got there early enough that we wouldn’t have to–god forbid–climb stairs.

I was using a delivery app on Kamran’s iPad to order from our favorite cheap Mexican place when it suddenly told me that the restaurant had unexpectedly closed. And that’s when I kind of freaked out. My grocery delivery service had cancelled my order on Sunday afternoon. The grocery store had already closed when we tried to go Sunday night. The convenience store was empty. And now we couldn’t even get any quesadillas. WE WERE GOING TO STARVE.

But thank god for the Asians. There was so much sushi and Indian still to be had that we had a hard time deciding which restaurant to order from. When we finally did, though, I was practically screaming at Kamran to hurry up and get the order in before even they decided to pack it up. We didn’t actually believe that the food would ever come even once the order went through, but an hour later, a nice young Indian man brought us a bag full of $100 worth of biryanis, masalas, kormas, and samosas to feed us for the next two days.

Ellie texted me to say that her friends in Long Island were facing a mandatory evacuation, and The Weather Channel was doing nonstop coverage from beach houses being torn apart on the Jersey shore, so I finally decided to fill a sink with water. Not the bathtub, though, because seriously? I did look up how to flush the toilet with a bucket of water, though, in case the Internet went out mid-poo. We prepared an old season of “Big Brother” on Kamran’s computer so the cable could feel free to stop working. We charged all of our devices so there’d be plenty of Angry Birds on the iPhones and “Wuthering Heights” on the Kindle if everything else failed.

And then nothing happened. It rained a lot, and the wind sometimes sounded violent, and the power certainly flickered all night, but we sat munching on Skittles and pepperjack cheese like it was any other weekend. We figured out that the convenience store wasn’t empty at all but that they had just consolidated everything to the refrigerated case in the back. We let the water out of the sink and brushed our teeth and went to bed, and everything was perfectly normal the next morning.

After spending Tuesday afternoon eating our second round of Indian food and assuring our families that absolutely nothing had gone down and that the news reports were wildly overblown, we decided to actually leave the house and check things out. We walked ten blocks north and found a couple of overturned trees, a bus stop shelter with its glass blown out, leaves blown under cars. I received an e-mail from my office’s building management saying that the building had sustained no damage but that the electricity was out. My roommate texted me and said, “People tell me there was a hurricane, but I don’t see it.” All of the mentions of looting and dumpster-diving seemed ridiculous.

For the next few days, my office stayed closed, and the subways weren’t running, so I woke up when I pleased and did what I wanted. Kamran went to work out of guilt, and I met him for lunch every day. Most restaurants in our area were open right away, and they were packed with business people and tourists as usual. The buses came back online on Wednesday, and the trains began running above 34th Street on Thursday, and part of me felt really bad for the people who had to spend two hours just getting into the city from the boroughs, but part of me was soooooooooo thankful/superior that I work a nice, quiet office job where the management was encouraging us to stay home.

Even though things seemed so no-big-deal to us after the hurricane, we later learned that basically everyone below 39th Street lost power. And we live two blocks from that. Even though my office building wasn’t damaged at all, it’s still closed even a week later because of its lack of heat and hot water. The subway platforms are packed. The buses seem to come when they feel like it. Only about half of our regular delivery restaurants are open.

We’re just barely feeling a percentage of what the people downtown and in Staten Island and on the outer banks of Brooklyn and on the shores of New Jersey are, and we know how lucky we are.