Found it!

So I am, boringly, obsessed by search.

Not in an existential, meaning-of-life type of way, just finding stuff. On the internet. How it's organised, how the algorithms work, what filters are available and are they the right ones. That kind of thing.

The thing is, there was this movie. The premise of the movie is as follows: the electricity stops working. All of it. The tv, the radio, the cash machines, the cash registers. Phones. Boilers. Torches. Everything.

I saw it - most of it- as an undergrad, but I went to bed before the end.

Bad decision.

Ever since, I have wondered how that movie ended. And since then (I was an undergrad 1999 - 2002, including honours), search technology has gotten better and better. It's hard to think back that far - yahoo! may well have been the search leader at the time, I don't know. I've decided not to look it up, mostly to prove a point, though I'm not yet sure which point.

All I know about the movie is the premise, and something about a kid with an earache. No actors. No title. No idea when it was made.

I have literally (that's the literal definition of literally, by the way) been avoiding searching for this movie for years. Basically out of fear. Not the fear that I won't find the movie, more the fear that I can't find the movie. That either my search skills, or the search mechanisms, will be deficient. That, having started to look, I'll get sucked into a horrible vortex of either a) failing and giving up or b) (more likely) becoming obsessed and losing hours of my otherwise productive time to a fruitless enterprise of scooting around the internet, finding search mechanisms and typing variants on 'that one movie where the electricity stopped working and the kid got an earache and I think there was a gun'.

So tonight I finally tried to find it.

It took seven minutes.

I got there - unexpectedly - by searching 'electricity' on www.findanymovie.com, and clicking through to (only!) the second page. Then I checked the checked the potential title-match against www.imdb.com. (The search functionality on imdb is awful, by the way, although the summaries are good once you've found what you want.)

The movie is called "the Trigger effect". I have no idea if I recommend it or not.

But now that I've found it, I'm going to find out.