Power out

        It’s Saturday night. Around 07:00pm the power went out. There was these ominous sounds that accompanied it. At first we thought that it was just he local sub-station that had been overloaded again. Politicians and their promises of free electricity to the poor masses has a tendency to over extend infrastructure, so we have gotten used to this. But, after a few minutes of the unnatural silence, we could here the deep basso resonance of the diesel generators at the platinum refinery a couple of minutes from our house. This immediately dispelled the notion that it was a local power outage. You see, the refinery is powered directly from the national power grid and doesn’t rely on the local government infrastructure. As such, the power should be restored quickly as well, if the power distribution lines to this area had not been damaged.

        About six months ago another power outage occurred whilst I was at work. This one affected the Sandton business district. It’s main cause was an automobile accident that took out the pylon that support the high tension cables, running distribution power to our area. A simple sedan had crashed into the power pylon and caused the tower to topple over. We were without power at that time for over seven hours.

        In our house hold the opinion expressed by the old folks lays the fault at the door of the national power utility that is at present busy with public participation hearings to get a 16% per year increase in the rate that they sell their units to the populace. Their has been wide spread opposition to this parastatal that will increase it’s electricity cost by 120% over this five year period. This is on top of the 170% increase we have been faced with over the last several years.

        At the moment I’m typing this blog post on a laptop that has a faulty battery. It charges at differing levels. So I am waiting for the black out to hit this machine soon. The percentage indicator has as yet not moved. This is what I get for delaying the replacement of this battery.

        A plus here is that we are now lighting candles throughout the house for lighting. It’s great atmosphere but not too good for reading or getting anything more done. Candles work nicely when you have them directly at your workspace, but if you look around your space, you will find that it has been arranged for centralized electric lighting. It would be interesting to see what oil lamps or even gas lamps do for practical lighting.

        At least power was restored in about an hour, hour and a half. So, at least I didn’t need to worry too much about the laptop and cellphone batteries lasting through the night. Which was good too, since I got a support call at 02:35am. At least writers don’t get called at these awful hours to write a new chapter, or kill of the villain sooner. Get the hero and the girl to fall in love. At least I don’t think they do.