It’s difficult to say anything about the blackouts which hasn’t been said before, especially when one has to be really bright (sorry) to compete with the country’s wags who are having a field day.
South Africans have shown again they know how to come to terms with the loads they’re expected to share.
There’s shock at the unreality of the event, even denial that this can be happening. We find ourselves bargaining that if events by some stroke of magic can turn around, we will not repeat the same stupid mistakes.
Then comes smoking anger, followed by depression, and finally resignation – for which read, humour - when we find one or more ways to deal with what just happened.
If you doubt any of this, consider your thought processes or verbal utterances when at the moment of the blackout yesterday, your computer crashed before you had a chance to save that last bit of work, or you were in that no-man’s land between your front door and the electronic gate of your townhouse complex and you only had the remote buzzer which doesn’t work when the power fails.
Or, you were dangling in the cable car 1085 metres above Table Bay but within an “easy” two-metre jump of the top of Table Mountain.
The blackouts have been nostalgic for me, because I can trace my existence to a former electricity shortage. No, it’s not about what my parents were doing when the lights went out!
My old man worked on laying bricks for the chimney stacks at the Swartkops power station, having come down from the Cape to seek his fortune. His prospects weren’t only switched on by the heat-generating facility, but also the hot chick who became my mother.
I’m also intrigued at how, in one monumental foul-up, the national electricity people have got us all to re-assess our bag of excuses.
No longer do kids say the dog ate their homework. Now it’s more elaborate than that, involving candles and wax and eye-strain.
One young bugger claimed the reason his breath stank was because the batteries in his toothbrush weren’t fully charged as a result of the power cut.
Late for work? Well, the traffic lights were down all along your route, weren’t they? And you did stop to assist in directing traffic at the five-ways intersection, didn’t you?
One production manager at a large company said it was difficult doing an exact analysis of the cost of blackouts because every slapgat employee can trace his or her production problems to the electricity crisis.
And a business associate who needed to sign a couple of important documents claimed that the delay in putting his million-dollar mark on the paper was because of power cuts. I didn’t have the energy to ask at what point taking up a pen and setting his hand down on the paper stopped being a mechanical action and needed electrical energy.
When I told a mate I had to rush to my desk to write this before the lights went out, he said I should repeat what a Gauteng columnist did this week and just ask the editor to print a black square where this piece normally goes.
But, the nicest thing for me in a blackout is heading to the local supermarket. The traders can’t afford to have downtime on the tills, so you’re guaranteed some cool, dimmed grocery aisles powered by a good generator. Even if you’ve already spent the monthly budget, wander along with an empty trolley and chat to fellow customers because, in a crisis, our natural defences about engaging with strangers are swept aside.
Eish-kom!
