Let there be light (and TV)

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.

The pretty lightshade is even nicer with electricity

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. Can’t get much worse, you think. But it does.

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 wish there were viable, accessible alternatives to Eskom. Apart from the solar geyser, which Eskom offered rebates on for a short time, the cost of individual homes installing other power sources, such as wind, is prohibitive. It’s been kept high to prevent competition to the parastatal.

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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