Wrapped up in a fluffy blue blanket, I am shivering behind the wheel of my stationary car. It’s night time,
somewhere in the middle of a 40-hour power outage, and I am listening to my car
radio. It’s the only way I am going to know whether swimmer Cameron van der
Burgh has won a gold medal at the Olympics.
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| A pretty lightshade, and it’s even nicer when there is power |
It was bad enough having no landline phones
or ADSL internet connections for three days last week. You get quite used to
such things down here, and you survive: when you have signal, you use your
cellphone for essential calls (too expensive for just a chat), and you buy data
so that you can occasionally check your email. Couldn’t get much worse,
you think. But it did.
The fact is that in South Africa, our big
state monopolies (Telkom for telecommunications and Eskom for power) provide expensive and unreliable services.
With our solar geyser, we at least have hot
water when the power is down – as long as the day is not overcast. And we don’t
use heaters; we use our small fireplace for heating. But there’s that sick
feeling as you think of all your frozen food spoiling in a defrosting freezer!
I do wish there were viable and accessible
alternatives to Eskom. Apart from the solar geyser, which Eskom has offered
rebates on but only in recent years, the cost of individual homes installing
other power sources, such as wind, is still prohibitive.
Work becomes a huge problem without power –
I work on my laptop for a while and then drive into town to charge it up. I
charge my cellphone in my car.
Of course, we all complain bitterly, and
rightly so. But we can’t be angry with the technicians, who seem to work flat
out to find the faults and fix them – it’s the monopolies that must take the
blame for shocking maintenance, not the techies.
Anyway, at 9pm on the second night of
candlelight, V carried a tray of hot coffee and a packet of lemon cream
biscuits to the technicians.
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