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The Big Electricity Outage

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This day was a buy out lunch kind of day. I changed my clothes, put money in my pockets and headed through the door. I walked to the main road, waited a short while and then boarded a green band maxi taxi. My destination was David's roti shop. I was getting a small chicken roti and my mom wanted a small rice, dhal and curry goat. On my way back I got a drop from my uncle who spotted me while I was waiting for a maxi taxi. Lunch was fulling and satisfying. Lunch was accompanied by an entire 20oz bottle of Coca Cola. The sweet drink was poured into a plastic tumbler filled with ice. That was perfection for the hot weather we were experiencing.

Shortly afterwards I was in need of a midday nap. As I switched on the air conditioner and about a minute of time had passed, current was gone. This also meant no internet. I was sleepy from that hearty lunch and slept for about 2 hours until about 2 pm. I was sweaty, sticky and hot. I felt like I was living in the arabian desert. The electricity had not come back. I decided to check my prepaid mobile balance to see if I had enough to add some mobile data. That short code was failing. I started to think that this was a major islandwide outage.

I don't have a wired air buds to make the over the air radio app work on my mobile. But I remembered that I had a speaker cord that could work. I located that from my box of gadgets and plugged in and I was now listening to local radio. Some of the radio stations were offline. I heard about the islandwide outage on one of the radio stations. At this time I decided to blog about this. I was planning for a few more hours and praying for the sun to go down. I have no candles but I have the flash light on my mobile.

I was peeled to the radio for music and any updates on the outage. I had to be careful to not use up the battery on my mobile. At 4 pm I decided to have a small dinner and take a bath. The water pressure was so low that there was no water in the shower head. I was getting water in the low pipe and could take a bucket bath. Times like this I appreciate the things that I normally take for granted. During the 5 pm news update there was no info on what caused the outage. They said restoration was going to happen on a phased basis and take several hours. Listening to over the air radio feels like going back in times.

By night fall I had a mattress by the front door to feel the cool night air which I could not feel from my bedroom. But after about 1 hour dealing with the greedy mosquitos I was back in my bedroom. I twist and I turn. I was in between sleep and wake until 1152 pm and then the power had been restored in Cunupia where I live. God bless the workers of T&TEC and the power generation companies.
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