Website "global" meta descriptions: Just say no!

Did I tell you about the time I had a well ranking website that suddenly disappeared from Google altogether? No? Oh, well let me explain the feeling you get when it happens: panicked confusion. You pretty much go through all of the stages of loss. Your top spot was like a relationship that you had worked on really hard, and suddenly she packs her bags and moves to another continent.
A little background on the website: it was a well put together site running on a CMS and had been pretty well SEO’d. Domain authority was good. It had a decent bit of link juice. It was the top result for locally targeted searches for quite a few relevant keywords and had been so for a long time.