Lock-down Day 601

Wednesday, 17 November

Oh, I can be a twit, can't I? Yesterday I headed the post with 'Monday'! Well, I have an excuse - it was my first day of the week, at work. Well, I fixed it now!

No load shedding during the night - yay! I took a chance and left the PC on.

Aaand, we're load shedding Stage 2! From 14:00 ... which means that our lights will stay on tonight, but will go out tomorrow from 12:00 - 14:30 and again from 20:00 - 22:30 tomorrow night, again 20:00 - 22:30 Friday night and 04:00 - 06:30 Saturday morning. Well, they say it'll stop at 05:00 Saturday morning ... Eish!

For my non South African readers, Eish! (pronounced Aysh!) is a South African colloquialism used to express quite a wide range of emotions. It could mean 'Oh, crap!' or 'Oops' or 'WTF?' but mostly it means 'Oh, crap!' (though, use a stronger expression in place of 'crap'). Now you'll also get my constant reference of Eskom as Eishkom :) Eskom is South Africa's ONLY electricity supplier ... well, our government has recently given permission to independent companies, but it's going to take a while before they will be able to actually do so.

Phew, it's hot again today!

Crazy drive home, the weather had turned and it was stormy! When I got into the car, the temperature was 30 Celsius. Half an hour later, when I got out, at home, it was 17 Celsius! That's quite a sudden drop!

Worse though, as I feared, the power was off at home.  Grrrr... neighbours assumed load shedding.  I told them it's  not, and that I reported it via sms ... that was 10 minutes ago,  though,  and I still haven't received confirmation!

It can't have been off for long,  though, because my UPS hadn't even started  beeping ...

I'm afraid I don't have the airtime to hold for half an hour. Grrrr 

It would seem that no airtime is charged while waiting for a consultant to answer. After 10 minutes, I hung up and checked my airtime - no change. Now I've been waiting another 25 minutes. I'm almost certain they turn off the phones! Grrr 

At least I have a signal, and - for now - internet on my mobile.  Still no reference number, either.

I fear that, since we don't actually have a mayor or municipality right now, it's a matter of 'when the cat is away, the mice come out to play'. Parties are still negotiating coalitions  ... Tshwane is still hung, unresolved. 

After over 40 minutes, a human answered! I could hardly believe it! But guess what? Their system is down! That's why I didn't get a reference number! Oh, and they can't do anything either! WTF?!? No manual backup? FFS!

Well, they did take my details and promised to log my call when their system comes back on .... sigh ... 

Yay! Around eight, the power came back on! I had already wipe-washed myself, changed, eaten bread rolls for dinner ... Internet went off, so I lost some of what I had typed on my mobile ... whatever.

Now I'm just going to watch an episode of Columbo, poor mippies got neglected while I was trying to report the power outage ...