Saturday night saw me entertaining a fascinating conversation with mike on why my blog is broken when I heard a loud bang and my PC switched off.

Yes, I have a UPS. Yes, it worked. Yes, I tried to shutdown. Yes, it switched off before I could shutdown anyways. My UPS lasted maybe 30 seconds… okay? Oh well, I don’t particularly care. It’s there more to add an extra layer of protection to the funky source of electricity that is Eskom right now than to actually serve as a backup power supply. It works fine for those 2-second brownouts that are occurring with increasing frequency these days, so it serves its purpose really.

But back to my story — I heard a loud bang. It was very odd, everything turned off — sort of. My server sat there beeping at me telling me it didn’t have enough power to turn back on. So clearly there was some electricity, just not very much as was evident by the very pale glow coming from all the lights. Checking the breakers nothing was off. Odd? Opening the curtains revealed all the neighbours lights to still be on. Odd? This was not one of Eskoms “load-shedding� cycles gone wrong then.

A few minutes later all power was gone and so were our neighbours’ lights and all the street lamps. Identification! Okay, so we knew the problem wasn’t just localised to our house then but rather a few blocks. Wonderful!

A quick call logged to Eskom revealed no knowledge of said problem, and no apparent “load-shedding�. So imagine our surprise when 2 guys pitched up in one of those trucks with the arm on the back not even 15 minutes later. Obviously a quick response isn’t exactly something you’d normally expect from any national service, so the cynic in me can only believe these guys are getting paid overtime, and well, late Saturday night is about as overtimey as it gets.

So after a brief explanation of what had happened they were off. I heard them driving up and down the roads quite a bit (their truck was noisy and rattled quite a bit), but whatever they were doing it seemed to work and the electricity was back up and running after about an hour. I can only assume that something blew up and they replaced it?

Isn’t it funny how we as South Africans generally praise good service, when this is how it should be normally? I guess this is a result of all the shocking service that is dished out to us on a daily basis with everything else.