And Everything Comes to a Halt

The dependence on technology today is sometimes scary. Now I do not mean the communication, media and internet nor the machinery used across all aspects of human life. I am referring to the most basic of technology – electricity. In the past I have lived in houses and flats which had both electricity and gas supply. The appliances were split in the utilisation of both, with gas being used for cooking and heating and the rest using electricity. This meant that a power cut while inconvenient would not stop all aspects of life. However, in the houses now a days there is a trend for everything electric.

A few years ago, I lived for the first time in an all-electric house. One afternoon there was a massive thunderstorm – a huge flash of light and a deafening clap of thunder and suddenly no power. My laptop was running on battery and that was all that was functioning. The phone line is connected into a modem and so without electricity there is not internet and also no landline. I also did not have a mobile phone in those days as I never really needed it. As I had no experience of power loss here, I was wondering what to do. Thought I should get a cup of tea and have a think. But oh! Without electricity how can I boil my kettle? The hob was also electric and so could not even boil a pan of water. So, I did a very Indian thing and went next door to check if they had power.

The young girl next door said they had a cut too but her mother had called to reassure the kids that it was ok. The call to electricity company had explained that a local junction box had taken a hit of lightening. I then walked over to my nephew’s house a couple of streets away. There I could ring the electricity company to lodge a complaint. I was surprised to find that when you called, they asked you to put in the area code and this gave a recorded message about the lightening hit and that power would be restored in 3 – 4 hours.  True to their word it was restored come evening.

This kind of outage happened once more but two other times it was planned outage for maintenance. I have to work out how to manage for the few hours and it was not so bad. But any longer than a few hours and it is hell. In the past few years, we have had massive storms and power outage across large parts of the city and suburbs which lasted several days. Life comes to a halt – freezer and fridge goods perished, no heating or hot water and no kitchen appliances could be used. Now with a trend to automate everything via Google or Siri or Alexa where even the opening of your front door is controlled by password or facial recognition what will happen if there is a power cut? You will either be locked in or locked out of your house. Is the fact that we have relatively very few outages making us forget to take that aspect into account when automating our homes? I enjoy technology but that is one step am not yet ready to take just in case…….