To the Dark Ages and Back Again

The last couple of days have been quite interesting. On tuesday I came up with an idea for my 3rd year Final Major Project, which would be a social networking based project, but I'm not going to go into that now. but myself and my boyfriend dicussed the possiblities that as part of research I could document my social networking habits for 40 days and then document myself going without my social networking for 40 days. (I am on quite a few social networking website and people who know me genereally seem to view me as a bit of a Facebook addict!). And yesterday I got an unexpected chance to experience life without social networking...

Without ANY electricity in fact... for 24 hours, we literally got it back about an hour ago and I felt the need to blog the experience. Both myself and my boyfriend found it incredibly weird living out without electricity which has become a basic human comodity. We were both constantly going to turn on lights to be able to see as natural reactions. Without use of our computers we were both at a loss as to what to do with ourselves and thoughts I had were "Well lets go and play some games on the playstation" then realising that too ran off of electricity. That in itself raised some interesting questions in my head about my association with my computer. At first my head seemed to have been thinking more about the disconnection with the internet, and associating my computer with the internet, rather than the fact all the electricity and power had gone from our house.

Even so though this was not the first concern for either of us, especially me who was not at my computer at the time but in the shower (with conditioner in my hair!!!) but was actually the issue of the fact that we had no form of light. It was about 8 o'clock when the electricity went so it was dark outside. We had no torches and at the time we had no candles. Luckily though the spar down the road stays open til 10pm and we managed to find some tealights, which are crap at lighting rooms, but at least we had some light. Not that it made much difference as I still missed the last step going down into the kitchen and poured wax all over my thumb, despite the fact the tealight was in a ramikin, luckily it wasn't actually hot still by the time it reached my thumb. We did however spend the first hour in the dark using the light from our mobile phone screens to look at the fuse box, we flicked all the switches and had come to the conclusion that it was all buggered but the landlord did not seem to want to accept this!

Which then brings us on to our 3rd problem. Both of us had low batteries on our phones, so we started off using mine to contact the landlord but by the end of the night after the many phone calls and text messages my phone battery was dead and Craig's had only one bar left. So when the landlord had decided there was no more he could do that evening in the way of contacting someone to come out and take a look and it would be first thing in the morning that someone would come and when we would next get a text from him we turned Craig's phone off. And this morning was spent turning his phone on and off until about midday when it decided it had no more left to give. Luckily though just before this we got the text message saying someone was coming at 5:15 rather then the 3:30 from previous texts.

And they came and concluded exactly we had concluded and rang the electricity board for us and about an hour or so later the first man appeared, deduced that is was buggered and most of it needed to be replaced, called the technition and he went away. Another hour later and technition one arrived shortly followed but technition 2. After mini explosions, fireworks and lots of banging and screwing suddenly the lights came on!

It was an interesting experience and proved just how much we rely on electricity. I couldn't finish my shower properly since the water ran cold the moment the electricity was turned off; dinner was fish and chips from chip shop since we could cook nothing in the oven as it has an electric spark; we were not prepared for a blackout as we had no torches or candles and could only buy tealights from the spar because we had no holders for the taller candles and they didn't sell them; we were at a loss as to what to do with ourselves in the dark without much light and no computers to use, no games console to play on and no power on our phones to ask for more help, so we read comics by tealight!

Although it was quite stressful because we were worried about whether all of our newly bought shopping was going to defrost, we had to laugh, I guess it was quite funny, but we also didn't want to go mad. I guess people on the dark ages were more prepared than we were!