Hot And Without Power

Like always, this July is also very hot and humid and like what seems always, we again are having load shedding. For those of you who are more fortunate and do not know what it means:
load shedding
the deliberate shutdown of electric power in a part or parts of a power-distribution system, generally to prevent the failure of the entire system when the demand strains the capacity of the system.
Retrieved July 12, 2009, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/load shedding

Currently we face undergo four hours without power here in Islamabad and it is even worse in some other parts of the country. To top it, our power line broke down in the early hours of Saturday morning and we were left panting and heaving with heat for the next eight hours. And of course, the complaint center had taken its phone off the hook. From experience, we know that as long the phone is "busy" the fault is still being traced and no end is in sight. And when they do answer it is usually a promise of power returning within an hour, but it rarely happens and we go back to the phone being "busy". It is a futile exercise really but being without power, we have little else to do. It is either that or running around the roof in the early hours of the day, as our neighbors seem to prefer. Only, they like our roof much better than their own.

Since then, we are back to our four hours of load shedding, but since our load has been "shifted" to another grid, the hours are changed and we only find out which when the computer goes off in the middle of some work or ... It is a miracle really that our appliances are still working.
Not to forget, there is another form of power outage of 10-15 minutes and this is also sudden and unannounced. This happens when our grid "heats up".
It is reassuring however to realize that we have come through a few years of this and what is wrong with putting up with another few!