Damn power cut!!!

// July 31st, 2009 // General

Power cuts aren’t fun. No siree! Let me tell you about the one from last night.

I wake up at about 4am and can hear a distinct beeping coming from somewhere. For a short while I try to ignore it, but it was even starting to disturb Carly, so I went out to investigate. It was the flat’s alarm control box, and it was beeping loudly because it was running on emergency battery backup. Now surely the beeping would drain the battery even more, but the real reason to stop it was that it was keeping us awake. After reading up in the manual and five minutes of fiddling, I got the beeping to stop. Wondering why it wasn’t using the proper power, I went to the cupboard downstairs in the block of flats to see what was going on. I poked my head out of the front door, and I could hear everyone else’s alarms beeping as well as I walked down the stairs. I peered into the cupboard. All the metres were blank. It was a power cut.

“Ah well”, I thought, so I went back to bed. All wrapped up under the sheets again, I started to settle down to a, now peaceful, night’s sleep.

*CLUNK* *CLUNK* *Whirrrrrr*

It was clear to me that the power had come back on. I opened my eyes to a room full of light. My computer had come to life. The internal lights from the fans and the UV bulb were shining out of the window on the side of the case and lighting up the room. It was accompanied by the gentle whirring of my three hard drives. I sighed. I think Carly sighed too. I got up to turn the computer off. However, as I walked over to the PC, the national grid decided to do it for me. Pitch blackness again.

I sighed again, and went back to bed, and then the PC sprung back to life once more. I thought to myself “I can’t be arsed!” so I just left it running. This was a mistake, as it then became clear to us that this was an intermittent power outage. The PC was firing up, then shutting off, firing up, shutting off, and was doing so for the next few minutes. Getting fed up with it, I went to the PC and turned off everything at the plug.

Now for some sleep. Of course, the power cuts had caused my alarm clock to reset itself. Since we didn’t know how long this was gonna go on for, I set the alarm on my phone instead. We drifted off to sleep again…

Upon waking up three hours later, it was clear that the power still hadn’t come back on. This meant no hot water, no coffee, and no television. It also meant we couldn’t wash, even with the cold water, because there’s absolutely no natural light in the bathroom. We couldn’t have cereal because I had no milk. Things were grim. I suggested we go to the local café before heading off to work, but sadly there wasn’t time. Carly had to go to work.

I ended up driving to work all crummy and tired, and having to stop by the shops in Whaley Bridge to get a coffee and a breakfast bap.

Thankfully when I got back from work earlier today, the power was back on. Phew!! 🙂

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