Candlelit Dinner
Posted: November 12th, 2009
We had a power cut in central Edinburgh on Monday night. Power was out for slightly over ten minutes, but it was long enough to get the candles out to continue eating dinner. I only mention this because my younger daughter, who is nearly ten, said that it was her first power cut. Needless to say she found it very exciting. So we’ve not had a power outage in our part of the city for at least ten years. This is an amazing story of reliability and robust infrastructure - and the power industry, which is really only a century-or-so old is to be congratulated.
Once the candles were on our first steps were to check on a few potentially vulnerable people and ensure they either had power or torches. But of course our landlines were out because of the DECT base station being mains operated. So it’s onto the mobiles, which worked fine.
Then this morning Vodafone had an outage - I noticed this when I turned on my phone to feed my e-mail addiction. No connection, so switched on WiFi and off it went. I assumed it was our local base station having a bad morning, possibly because of all the people using phones from their cars queueing in the traffic jam that forms outside our house at the moment due to roadworks somewhere downstream.
But apparently not - it was nation wide. And for the first time that I’ve seen, Vodafone actually posted information on what was happening. This is progress since operators traditionally deny furiously that anything could ever go wrong, so congratulations to Vodafone for opening up.
And finally, congratulations to the Brazilians for having the right attitude to the massive power cut that hit all the major cities there this week. One man was quoted as saying “we’ve a different way of doing things here - we just drank beers until the power came back.”
