confusion and incompetence

hi everyone

well, this would be one of those "moans and groans" updates here, so you have been warned! for starters here, for those of you who will indulge me, are how we have got on with that mystical, magical beast known as electricity for the last two weekends....


Sunday March 8 : wake up to find no electricity supply. nothing on the news on the radio, no announcements, call the 24-7 telephone number, they are not at all sure what's going on or when it will be fixed. we thus engage in a mad scramble to get our gas braai going to heat some water and cook a rather splendid breakfast.


Sunday March 15 : after every news bulletin in Saturday March 14 advising us that our area will be without power from 8am to 5pm the next day. their website, which helpfully advises you that they will deny that anything on the site is true so do not believe it, confirms this. their "help" line confirms this. we get all prepared - boil water and fill flasks, get some food that's easy to cook on an outdoor barbecue thing, have lots of things ready to keep James entertained. i get up at 6am on Sunday to shower and make sure we are covered for a day without electricity. surprise! we instead had bucket fulls of electricity the whole day, without a blip.

no doubt the power companies here, City Power and their incompetent leash holders, Eskom, will be of the view that we should be grateful that the power didn't in fact go off. not really, not really, no would be the response to that. why get everyone to be prepared for a switch off that they take the time to announce and then have nothing? this no doubt means that we can expect the power to go off at random over the next few days / weeks / months / years.

the radio station which didn't report that the power was off and then actively did announce that it would go off when it didn't was of course the station that certainly isn't getting any better and daring to get worse, 702. they claim that they are the "number one news station". it's hard to understand this, much like it's hard to understand how they get away with claiming that their news bulletins are "independent" when they are all sponsored by one Company or another.

interestingly, 702 once upon a time used to say that they were the "number one information" station, too. obviously on the above this is incorrect, so it is no surprise that they have dropped that claim. just as well, really. today they broadcast a "classic chart" from 1966, and populated the airspace with news from that year.

one of the announcements they made was that, in April 1966, apparently Janis Joplin died, aged 24.





alas, sadly, the great Janis Joplin died in October 1970, aged 27. that's some interesting research they clearly did, and i wasted effort mentioning to them that they looked foolish using words like "protagonist" and "unique" incorrectly.



ho hum, be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!