Black Out

Living in Crapchester is beginning to get to be like living in a Third World country.  Or one of those ex-Soviet block countries.  Now, those of you who know the fair city, sorry, urban conurbation, that is Crapchester, will probably be saying 'What's new about that?'  However, whilst this is a much maligned place - it is nowhere near as bad as most people (who have never been here) think it is - I have to say that having now suffered power outages for two consecutive days, I'm beginning to feel as if I'm living in South Sudan.  Having suddenly found myself without electricity yesterday lunchtime, as I was about to shave (with my electric razor) before I went out, resulting in me arriving at my mother's house heavily bearded, I really wasn't expecting to arrive home from work today to find myself back in the same situation.  The power was this time restored within an hour and a half of my calling the electricity suppliers, (I don't know how long it was out yesterday, it was back on when I got back home in the evening), so it wasn't as bad as the twenty hour outage we suffered in this little part of Crapchester a couple of years ago.  Nevertheless, this sort of thing shouldn't be happening with such monotonous regularity in the middle of a major population area.

Anyway, several questions arise from these latest outages.  Most significantly - why am I, inevitably, the first and usually only person to call them in?  My neighbours apparently seem happy to sit in darkness just hoping the power might come back on - it never seems to occur to them to phone up the electricity company.  After all, to be fair, the electricity suppliers aren't going to know there is an outage unless someone tells them.  I'm guessing, that like many people these days, my neighbours just assume somebody else is going to make that call so they needn't put themselves out.  The other big question is why these outages keep occurring - they clearly aren't directly linked to meteorological conditions. Despite one of the operators I spoke to at the electricity company valiantly attempting to link the latest outages to flooding, as I pointed out to him, the sub-station in question is never affected by flooding - this part of Crapchester is too high up to flood.  I gather that the last two outages have been resolved by replacing blown fuses at the sub station.  But this is only treating the symptoms - it begs the question of why the fuses keep blowing.  Clearly, there needs to be a more thorough investigation (there supposedly was after the twenty hour outage, with much excavating going on around the sub station, but this obviously resolved nothing), but that would cost money, which the privatised electricity companies seem reluctant to spend.  So I'm bracing myself for further outages.