My, what a nice generator you have

Outages are a fact of life in most of the developing world; power outages, in particular.

Imagine this scene: sitting in a friend's living room with after dinner coffee or standing around with a beer at someone's house party, chat chat chat. A sudden and complete blackness descends as the power is knocked off up and down the street, but conversation doesn't even hitch. Sometimes someone will give a complimentary comment on the speed at which the generator kicks in, as the lights flicker back to life (a clear bonus of being a well-heeled expat).

Streets go dark in a power outage.
Wait, we don't really have these
things anyway...

A more frustrating outage is the internet. Despite the company's bogus claims that it operates at a speed of 5 Mbps (when in reality it struggles to reach 1.2), it's really quite annoying when it is not there at all. I mean, my GOODNESS will we ever survive if we miss an email, fail to catch someone on Skype, or don't have the opportunity to post a timely comment on someone's Facebook post? OK, the Skype thing may be true for us, but the rest we don't get too antsy on. However, it is amazing how cut-off from "the world" we feel when we don't have internet. No news (our limited viewing TV channels usually go out when the Internet does), no researching activities to do, no daydreaming via websurfing about the next place in the world we might end up. The worst outage was 4 days. Which has happened a couple times. I have finally succumbed to buying a USB modem as a backup.

The third outage is water. This happened last weekend, when our water main broke and we were advised to conserve water. There is a tank in the attic which holds an indeterminate number of liters, but the chances of the fix being quick were low, since it ironically kept pouring rain so that no one could get into the ground to fix the pipe.

Upon considering our options, we decided that if we were given a choice for a 24-hour outage, we'd rather have internet than water.