The Night the Lights Went Out – A National Day Tale

2009-10-05

The National Day holiday is ongoing, but I thought it was appropriate to share this fun little story about what I've been up to for the last five days.

Last Wednesday night (September 30), around 8:00pm or thereabouts, I was sitting on the sofa with my laptop, wasting time as usual. All of a sudden the lights went out in the entire apartment, and since my laptop (which had been on AC power at the time) immediately shut off, I knew we were dealing with a power outage.

After my wife and I exchanged the usual "Are you OK?" calls across the apartment, we made our way to the window to see if anyone else had power. It looked as though we were the only ones. Next step was to check the fusebox, armed with a flashlight; we discovered nothing amiss.

At this point, my wife chuckled and joked "It would be really funny if we ran out of electricity tonight."

"Why is that?" I replied.

"The National Day holiday starts tomorrow, and the management office people will definitely be taking several days off."

I was not amused by this humorous rejoinder, particularly since we still hadn't figured out what was going on. Just to cover all the bases, though, my wife took the flashlight out into the hallway (outside of the apartment) and checked on the electricity meter.

"I've got some bad news," she told me. "We'd better run down to the management office ASAP and hope they haven't left for the day yet."

NOTE: We moved to our current apartment a couple months ago. No other place I've lived in here in Beijing over the past ten years forces you to pay for electricity through the management office.

The norm is to pay (in advance, you pay for a certain number of units) at the bank, in recent years via a smart card that you then plug into the meter at home. When the remaining electricity gets to a certain point, the meter flashes red, displaying the number of units left — at which point you go and recharge the card.

Where we live now, you can't go to the bank, so you are reliant on the management office folks (they are probably taking a percentage of the purchase) and their office hours to handle the transaction.

So, we ran down to the office. I was initially quite relieved to see two guys sitting there behind the desk. We said that we urgently needed to recharge our electricity as we had completely ran out.

Their answer: sorry, the person in charge of that has already left the office.

We asked if one of them could help us. Their answer: no, we don't do that.

We then asked when that person, or anyone else who could help us, would be available. Their answer: October 5 — five nights and four days away.

I am not making this shit up.

We clarified the situation but the answer remained the same — you are shit out of luck until October 5.

We have been enjoying the simple life, with no electricity, since that night. We were able to buy more of the elixir of life (as I now think of power) this morning.

It has been an interesting experience. Obviously the blogging and news reading has suffered. My preparations for my upcoming class, which begins next Monday, has been set back several days. The "good" news is that this was/is a long national holiday, so I don't have any work-related deadlines or anything to deal with.

You can't say this was good timing, though — it was the worst possible day of the freakin' year to run out of electricity, and it started for us the night before the worst freakin' day of the year. We really maximized the pain.

Well, we lost everything that was in the refrigerator and freezer (not too bad, thankfully), and were unable to use the coffee maker, microwave, lights or any other electrical appliance for the entire time.

Lessons to be learned:

1. Always keep track of your electricity usage.

2. Gas stoves are useful when microwaves are not working. If we had an electric range, we would have been screwed.

3. You can use the basket filter from your coffee maker, along with boiled water (see comment on gas stove above), to make sort of OK drip coffee.

4. Cucumbers become desiccated quite quickly if left outside the refrigerator.

5. It gets dark really early.

6. (Following #5) There is nothing much to do after it gets dark if you are foolish enough to have your entire life loaded onto your laptop.

7. Candles are very useful, but should be kept far away from cats that have long, flammable hair.

8. (Following #7) The smell of singed cat hair is extremely nasty.

9. The sheer number of portable electronic devices that we have is astounding, and it is impossible to pack all of them up, go out, and recharge them on a daily basis.

10. Reading a book with a flashlight was a lot more fun when I was ten years old and was defying my parents by staying up late. If you do it once you are grown up, it just hurts your eyes and gives you a headache.

[I should be back to a "normal" blogging schedule tomorrow.]

Tags: China News