Audrey Young: Drop, cover, hold and tweet madly

Photo / Tim Cuff

I had been putting off going into the ANZ since it merged with my trusty old black stallion bank, the National Bank.

With internet banking, there hasn't been any need to acknowledge it as my bank, until yesterday.

Internet banking can't cope with old-fashioned cheques. So that's where I was, when it happened, at the counter of my new bank on Lambton Quay trying to explain to the young teller that it is customary to give customers a receipt for cheques. A difficult customer, they were thinking.

The shaking began reasonably slowly at first, then gathered intensity. The staff had counters or tables to dive under. I don't recall there being any other customers in there. By instinct, I made for a big thick pillar in the middle of the bank, the ground floor of a high-rise between Lambton Quay and the Terrace.

As the shaking went on, the moans of dread rose. Until it stops, all you can imagine is that the roof will start caving in or the floor will open up. I don't think I had my arms around the pillar or anything too peculiar.

But in the middle of the shake, a young guy abandoned his safe corner and came over to the pillar to ask if I was all right.

I went back to my teller for the receipt. I suspect she handed it over in a different frame of mind. And I left in a different frame of mind, not so much "that bank" any more.

I headed back to the Press Gallery offices at Parliament, catching up on Twitter en route which told me that blogger Cactus Kate's glass of champagne at the Dockside had survived the quake (thank God), and that fellow blogger David Farrar had been at the Back Bencher pub at the time.

Lest you think most of Wellington adjourns to the pub on a Friday, my colleague Claire Trevett tweeted that she had been at the hairdressers - at the rinsing basin to be precise. Still wearing her hairdressers cape, with dripping wet hair, she ventured into Featherston St with her iPhone afterwards to tweet any damage (she was on a day off).

Drop, cover, hold, and tweet.

The last big six-point-something happened on a Sunday afternoon. A six-point something on a Friday afternoon is altogether different. Most workplaces sent staff home and they poured down the Parliament end of town.

Across the road at Victoria University's Rutherford House site, staff and students milled in the sun before Professor Bob Buckle got hold of a mike and sound system to announce the very best of news: lectures were cancelled and students needn't worry about their assignments. Better than a dog ate my homework.

Back at the office, I took a call from 12-year-old Alice, looking for her father, my colleague John Armstrong. She had been doing kapa haka at Wadestown School.

The desks had been moved so there was nothing to dive under. All the kids dived to the floor, she said, and covered their heads. Then they all headed outside but the worst thing, she said, was that Mr Smith made them carry on doing kapa haka for half an hour, not realising how bad the earthquake had been.

She put her 15-year-old brother Tim on the phone who said he had been in an economics class with Mr Moriarty in the tallest building at Wellington College. The weird thing for Tim was that just seconds before it happened he and his mate had been looking at the back of their economics text book and wondered aloud why there was a picture of the damage of the Christchurch earthquake.

Scary, indeed.