Ugh, I feel this so hard. Same thing happened to me over on W 117th a few years back, power blinked during a storm and my old pump just gave up while I was dead asleep. Woke up to soggy cardboard boxes and a rug that I had to drag out to the curb. The float switch on mine was nasty too, all gunked up with grit and rust, so I get exactly what you're dealing with. I ended up getting a battery backup after that and honestly it saved me twice since, because our power goes out here if somebody sneezes too hard. You are not asking for it, you are just being smart, because these spring storms are only getting worse. Do the backup, your future self at 2am will thank you.

Marcus is right though, and the lady next to you was wrong. A prompt is a recipe, not a fridge full of random stuff. If you hand someone a scene with no finish line, you're basically asking them to wander around in the dark and call it art, and most people just freeze or write something soft and pointless. "A woman waits at a bus stop with two bags and no coat" is fine as an opening image, but without a target, nobody knows if she's leaving someone, running from something, or just bad at planning for weather. The fake feeling you got writing her onto the bus probably wasn't because endings are bad, it was because THAT ending was bad, and a prompt that forces you to pick one would have made you commit instead of shrug.