Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Lights out

Sabah Electricity Board (SEB) should be shot. Okay so for the past year not much has happened in terms of power disruption but this month was a bit galling. Not was it once or twice but almost 8 times did our housing area of Taman Kingfisher was turned upside down in total darkness. Some was just a few minutes of disruption while others took longer from 10 minutes to half an hour. Last week was the worst, seems like it was 3 nights in a row where we found ourselves looking wide eyed as the lights on our room slowly blinked and then followed by a lack of visuals as every light in the neighbourhood was snuffed out. Followed by this would be the utter screaming of students living in the area shouting out, “Mati (Die) my last hour of typing gone down the drain!” or “Ayoh! Tomorrow got test and assignment to pass up and now this happened @@$$#^%^&$%!”

It surely is a good thing that I have a laptop that affords me a few hours of working even without electricity as compared to people whose life are snuffed out right before their eyes as the last of the juice went away. As I was mentioning, the first disruption came around 9p.m. last night, a slow spluttering of lights and then poof. We were prepared at least from the previous encounters to arm ourselves with torchlight and candles for the ordeal. So the house was ablaze with candles while groups of students and couples took the opportunity to enjoy the cool air outside and gazing into the night sky whose stars never shone brighter than at this moment. Ghost stories were being told freely to the accompanied shrieks of the girls and elsewhere babies were bawling the night away due to the heat. Others with motorbikes or transport took the chance to drive off into the night either to cool it off at a local coffee shop or to study at the university library study rooms which were not affected.

After 10 minutes the power was back but just as everyone was finishing blowing out the candles it went suddenly dark again. This time it wasn’t a short spell and I figure the sub station finally let out its final breath as one of its components went kaput forever. Laura’s housemates and both of us decided to cool off somewhere else and thus we drove off to a mamak stall to have some drinks to wait out the darkness. Sadly even at midnight we still saw the SEB workers busily trying t fix the station and final count was 4 hours of power outage that lasted until 1 a.m. Better hope this is not a trend, I can't stand swaeting in the hot room while sleeping.

No comments: