Run out of whiskey when the cold wind speak

The Southern California Gas Company emails you a survey every month or so asking you about energy crap. I almost always fill out surveys if they're presented to me. It's like Yelp, but real life.

So I was filling out my monthly survey today, which included a few questions about the recession (how it's effected my household, blah blah blah). I eventually came to a question worded something to the effect of: "Say you are unable to pay all of your bills this month. Please rank the bills below in the order of which you would pay them if you were financially capable to only pay some." Listed below the question were a bunch of monthly bill types waiting to be ranked: car payment, electricity, rent. Even completing this hypothetical task freaked me out. It's like their training us: "You are going to be shit poor because of the horrific economic situation we're in. How will you survive??"

I think it mostly shook me because about a year ago my former roommate and I were both on our third month of unemployment, had some insane Mongolian flu virus, living off a sack of 10lb potatoes we bought for a dollar at a Korean market, and depositing change from the coin jar to make rent. I'm not exaggerating. We still refer to it as the Potato Famine (obviously not because of a lack of potatoes, seeing as we had lots of those).

I've already paid my penance for this recession, SoCal Gas. Don't remind me.