}

Sunday, May 01, 2011

Powerless

When the power goes off, people act as if it hasn't, or as if the reality isn't real. We're no different.

Tonight our power went into a sort of "brown out" mode, something I've never seen in New Zealand. It was too weird, so at first we kinda acted as if it wasn't real. Then, we switched off the mains power, then switched off everything at the wall. We also rang the power company, but they're dealing with emergencies (due to high winds in the area) so it may be hours before they get here to check it out, assuming it's not up on the street or beyond.

So, I sit here and wait. Everyone else in the house is asleep. I suppose that if the workers find the problem elsewhere, I'll never know—well until morning, maybe. Meanwhile, bored, I tethered my iPad to my iPhone so I could post this, and keep sleep at bay for awhile longer.

My batteries on my phone and iPad should last a little while yet, so I should be able to act as if this isn't all happening for a little while yet. Well, apart from that whole staying up and waiting thing.

Update May 2: I went to bed at 12:30AM, with the workers never having showed up. We turned the power back on this morning and everything was fine. I haven't found out what the problem was. Also, the original part of this post has been slightly changed from the version I published last night; it's really not that easy to type on an iPad, it turns out, so I fixed a few things.

2 comments:

Roger Owen Green said...

I suppose I ought to have such redundancy systems but I don't. When the laptop's energy dies, and the cellphone runs down, that'll be it.

Arthur Schenck said...

Both SHOULD last for many hours if fully charged, As I wrote about after the earthquake, I keep my cellphone on a charger so it's always at full charge, the other stuff, well, not so much. They make solar chargers for all that stuff—not that I have one, of course…