If a regular reader, you’ll know my family and I were without mains water for a few days, a few weeks ago. This week, our informal and unexpected, what you might call, ‘apocalypse training’ was all about electricity or, more accurately, the lack of it.
There’s an elaborate fuse system in our house, the frontline of which is our children, who are the first to alert us to any outages, with complaints of dark-screened computers. And that’s how it began one ordinary Saturday afternoon, when young Solomon complained about his lack of IT, assuming my God-like competence would soon have the situation sorted. Sadly, a visit to the fuse cupboard showed no obvious or fixable problem, taking me to my next go-to position: going outside to see if our neighbours were facing a similar challenge.
With the sun out, albeit barely (on this, the 5,000th day of near continuous rain), the strangely reassuring tell-tale sign of unlit living or bedroom lights in other houses was not to be seen. Maybe the little lights on smart meters might confirm or deny current, I thought, which they did at the home opposite, as did a lit outside light, which empty holiday homes often sport, causing my heart to drop through my shoes.
We were indeed alone in this affliction, it seemed, and my domestic management skills were the ‘smoking gun’ for Mrs M, who, of course, had hours of online work to perform in this unexpected and unceremonious moment of off-grid living.
With echoes of ‘water-gate’ – ours, not Richard Nixon’s, when we lost our ‘água’ supply – ricocheting across my now properly stressed mind, which arose from a debilitating hybrid of personal incompetence and cultural misunderstanding, I desperately searched for evidence of payment and unheeded overdue demands in my spam-ridden inbox.
My (fortunately charged) laptop and (fortunately charged) mobile hotspot combo allowed internet access, with my smoldering wife in the near-distance, discharging me evidently of any blame, but leaving me feeling both responsible and helpless in the cold murkiness of a disconnected home.
Now it’s not often I feel like this, but the abject helplessness of a foreigner – a more regular occurrence in the early days of our new lives in Portugal – was upon me, having looked at every feasible and actionable angle of this predicament, only to find myself, ourselves, literally in the dark. I had forgotten how horrible it felt too, this expat emasculation, this immigrant isolation; up the creek of a new culture and without a paddle.
“What could it be, if not the fuses, not administrative error, and whilst neighbours near and far were online and lit, unlike us?”
What to do then, in this Portuguese pretty pass? To be fair, my kids were being very good about it, amusing themselves with the novelty of the analogue world, but not so much the consultant astrologer in the house, whose work is entirely dependent on electricity, computer hardware, specialist software and the new human right that is the internet.
What could it be, if not the fuses, not administrative error, and whilst neighbours near and far were online and lit, unlike us? Ready to curl up in a ball, but instead girding my loins to call the electricity supplier, realising that Saturday might not have them at their desks, I called my preferred energy purveyor Audax. And, in desperate anticipation, prepared myself for a sequence of many calls to their number and recorded switchboard message, to see if I could decode the fast-paced Portuguese, armed only with a translation app and high hopes.
As you’ve probably guessed, this led absolutely nowhere, not even to an overworked, underpaid human being with whom I could have an awkward conversation in my best Portuguese and second languages of apology and embarrassment. But no, this was not to be, and led to dismal projections and contingency planning for two days without heat, light and connection to our online livelihoods.
Digging deep and needing to set a good example of how an English alpha male might face adversity, philosophically and gracefully, I went about my non-electricity-requiring business as best as I could. In this, the ‘season of mold and rainbows’ as I heard someone recently call it, I carried on bleaching and vinegaring (a verb where I live) the kitchen, to take my mind off the electric elephant in the room and indeed the whole house, keeping that horrible sense of helplessness at bay.
On my perennial list of weekend chores was a repair to the front gate, which was one that had to be performed between rain showers – a normal feature of life now that the ordinarily April-focused phenomenon of “águas mil” applies to every winter month, these days. As I strode out to assess the task, one that would call amply upon those previously mentioned alpha male abilities, I noticed my neighbour – in pyjamas and slippers – probing her smart meter with the alpha female screwdriver, a table knife.
Never before have I been so pleased to see a knife-wielding woman, rapidly realising that she too was “não tem” (without) in the electricity department, and in exactly the same situation as us. The ‘missus’ overheard my exchange, knowing in an instant that me, her dear and doting husband, was not to blame for the blackout and that our power paralysis might soon be finding relief.
Soon, another neighbour joined us in the mizzly street, also plunged earlier into darkness and now awaiting the true alpha males, who – in rubber boots, hard hats, gloves and goggles – discovered the cause of our collective chaos. Constant rain had not only penetrated my wearied defences this week. It had also made its way into an on-street supply box between our three homes, mercilessly short-circuiting and frying some heavy-duty electrical kit, leaving us without ‘leccy’.
Many lessons were learned that day. Firstly, I am a better home finances manager than I, and my wife, gave myself credit for, but, more importantly in this sort of emergency, keep your rechargeable devices fully charged, especially when a storm like Jana is in your neighbourhood.
And for you, foreigners: know that your electricity supplier will not be able to help you in such circumstances and you should instead call the network, which my neighbours did, and who you can find at: www.e-redes.pt
