Leisure needs a bailout. Americans have lost the capacity to mill around.

Can we blame this on a national hyperactivity, a need to be in motion at all times? Is it a Starbuckian syndrome, our population with nerve endings atingle?

Standardized testing at U.S. schools gives no heed to recreational teachings, perhaps speeding the decline of competence in foot shuffling and idle chatter. No legislation addresses this. Unlike No Child Left Behind, fellow citizens seem content to leave dawdlers where they stand.

A difference exists between loitering and milling around. The difference is intent.

One loiters as an end. One mills around in anticipation.

If academe does nothing to promote and enhance this difference, the electrical utility seems to be trying.

Last Wednesday, a morning with bright sun and clear skies, the power went off in my office for more than an hour. Also in St. Joseph and throughout four counties.

Almost 50,000 electrical customers went dark.

The people around me voiced, colorfully, their disenchantment at potentially lost work. Then, some attuned to emergency service reporting fanned out to do stories of people trapped in elevators and police officers directing traffic.

A good number of folks, at loose ends and juice-dependent, found themselves in a situation much like prom ... in subdued light and with inexpert choreography.

The dance steps were the milling around.

A survey conducted last year indicated that Americans forgo about 460 million vacation days allotted to them each year. Almost one-third of the working people don’t use all the vacation due them.

And this in a nation whose workers get, on annual average, three fewer vacation days than the Canadians, 12 fewer than the British and 23 fewer than the French.

Thus, the sudden infusion of down time in a work setting produces no great euphoria but confusion. People would have preferred their computers to spring back to comforting life.

Production fell, and the mill-around rate rose.

Conversation in the room turned to the cause of the outage, and the consensus became “a squirrel.” Experienced hands knew that the near universal reason cited for electrical shutdowns (with no ice or lightning storms in the vicinity) included a squirrel that encroached a substation.

This time, a relatively new player in local episodes of blue-sky outages, Kansas City Power & Light, explained the problem as two-fold: a part of the grid taken offline for testing and another part crippled by coming into contact with a tree. Instability ensued, an imperfect storm of circumstance.

The outage came a week after the Missouri Public Service Commission granted the utility a nearly 12 percent rate increase. Customers would have probably preferred a “thank you.”

Things happen in this life that disrupt the normal flow of things. Weather creates mischief of various sorts at various times. Normally dependable circuits take a beating.

Misguided squirrels and disagreeable trees make for unpredictable days, too.

KCP&L uses as its slogan “Energizing Life,” a catchphrase with some spirit and punch. The company means not to be in the milling-around trade.

Ken Newton’s column runs

on Sunday and Tuesday.