Power Outages

Well, in exactly two weeks and 3 hours I'll be leaving SA for London :-) It's been hectic - you'd be amazed how much there is to do, and how easy it is to do some of it (like cancel my medical aid) and how difficult it is to do the rest of it (like cancel my TV licence). It'll be sad to go - today I rode out to Simonstown, and I'll miss the mountains and the sea. But I'm looking forward to being there, and in some respects I'm looking forward to leaving here (for example: the security complex where I live has gone downhill fast since the units have been sold off individually - while I'm sitting here, I can hear every word of an argument going on somewhere in the complex, with lots of shouting and "are you swearing at me" and more shouting - sounds like at least 3 people involved. I don't need that, and I suspect that it's the same unit that I've been hearing shouting and screaming from for about 2 days now).

Anyway, that's not the point of this post. The point of this post is: thank goodness for mobile devices! I'm sitting here blogging and checking my email using my laptop, my cellphone, and a torch, since the power's out. Again. Luckily I can touch type and don't need really need more light than I can get from the screen! If you're in Cape Town, or even in South Africa, you'll know this, but we've been having rolling blackouts since the weekend- due to a variety of reasons, apparently, but mostly because Koeberg's one unit is down for maintenance, and the remaining one is now having issues. It was going to be fixed yesterday, then it was today, now it's friday - although someone mentioned it would be another 50 days, which sounds about right. What gets me is that if it's a rolling blackout, then surely they know which area will lose power when - so why can't they tell us in advance? Even if they can't post a schedule a day in advance, it would be nice if they would tell us "don't start baking a cake; charge your laptop; make sure you've got a torch handy since the power will be going off in an hour". Or even more importantly, "don't get into a lift"! Don't ask me how they'd disseminate this info, but I'm sure they could come up with something :S And you never know how long it'll be off for - could be an hour, could be 3 or 4 hours. Or more.

And for me, it's just inconvenient - no TV, no lights, no freezer, no microwave; in fact, no takeaways since they're without power too (and my laptop has only 1 hour of battery life left - I won't even play MP3s since that uses up a lot of battery, and I'd rather stay connected a bit longer than have music). But what about people with babies, who need to heat up milk? Not to mention small businesses, shops, etc. - the amount of time lost isn't just the time without power, it's the time on either side, while you wait for the power to go off, and settle down to work again after it comes back. And big manufacturing plants, where you can't interrupt a process - although I guess they'd have generators, and the same goes for hospitals. And all the traffic lights that are either out because there's no power, or because they haven't been reset properly since the power came back on. And there are a lot of reasons that they're giving - but I think a lot of it all comes down to lack of maintenance. Although it's amusing to watch everyone trying to blame someone else :-)

Oops, I almost forgot to mention my alien conspiracy theory. You see, today my motorbike's battery went flat, even though it seemed to be working fine the other day; and my camera batteries, which I recharged on Monday and only used for 4 photos since, were also flat. So my theory is that there's a giant alien mothership sitting in geosynchronous orbite above Cape Town, somehow sucking up all the electricity ;-) It would explain why everyone's so evasive about the reason for, timing of, and duration of the power cuts! Although it wouldn't explain why my laptop & cellphone batteries are still fine... hmm, maybe they use a different type of battery that the mothership can't drain? Or, maybe, they want some of us to be able to get the word out in order to spread the fear... will your city be next?

Update: Darn, it's now 21:35 (two hours later) and still no power... only 5 minutes left on my laptop battery. Guess I'm just going to have to have an early night and catch up on some sleep :-(