Public Service

Sunday, May 20, 2007

"Hey, what's that?"

It's 4:30 in the morning, and my telephone is making a funny beep. I reach over to switch on the light to see what's going on.

It was at that point I discovered there was no electricity in the entire apartment! We had had outages in the past, quickly repaired. But this was different. No lights in the hallway, no elevator. The whole building was down

"Oh brother, why does this always happen on the weekend!"

I finally managed to get back to sleep, but when I woke up, still no electricity. It was at that point that it hit me how much we rely on electricity in our daily lives. It's like an invisible thread woven everywhere. We simply don't notice it until it disappears! What this means in reality was that I couldn't take a bath (no hot water). Couldn't listen to the radio. Couldn’t drink tea or coffee for breakfast (no stove). Couldn't go into my bathroom without a flashlight (no windows or outside source of light in the bathroom and you can't see worth diddly squat even if it's bright and sunny outside). Couldn't use the telephone (the cordless phone bases didn't work). Couldn't check my emails on the computer. Plus, insult added to injury, I ended up leaving a flashlight on in the bathroom and burned out both double D batteries. Goodbye flashlight.

At 8:30 that morning (at least my battery operated watches were still telling time), I went down (i.e. climbed down the stairs) to check out what was going on with the couple who are the "guardians" or building managers. Just as I arrived, they were phoning EDF (Electricité de France) which manages all the electricity for private residences. It seems that some major cable somewhere had blown out. Not only was our building down, but the entire block was without electricity! At 9 am I had my breakfast, or what you can call assembled room temperature items. I tried not to open the fridge door.

"Don’t even think about what's in the freezer."

I was real glad that I'm a regular swimmer at the local neighborhood pool where at least I could take a shower and wash my hair. And get away from the complete and utter silence of my apartment. "Ugh."

Just as I returned from the swimming pool, EDF arrived in force. An entire team disembarked with their trucks and tools and then proceeded literally to rip open the sidewalk to get to the cable. And they fixed it. Right there on Sunday morning they repaired a cable five feet underground in front of our building. When they left, they even had to leave a few team members behind to act as guards to make sure nobody fell into the hole or jumped in and sabotaged the repairs. But they did it. Electricity back on. Modern life back to normal.

That, my friends, is public service. How it's going to be affected by our new President Nicholas Sarkozy, I don’t' know. But at least we've got it now. Vive EDF!