Little Luke "Skywalker"

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Power Down!!

As soon as we arrived at our front gate, J complained about fatigue and hope to sleep early tonight (a definite after-effect of our routine). So, we prepared for bed as early as 9pm. We were lucky that Little Skywalker was very cooperative as soon as we turn off the lights. Everyone were sound asleep at about 9.30pm. FYI, once or twice a week, we sleep this early so that we will continue to wake up on time the next morning.

I got up to pee around 11pm (man! the urge to pee can really gives you weird dream huh??) and back to sleep again. As I almost saw Mr Chow's daughter in the horizon, everything around me went dead silent. I opened my eyes, and saw our air-condition was switched off. As I reach for my glasses, I found out that our radio clocks and fan were dead as well! I finally realized that our power was out.

Since we had no torch lights in our room, I reached out to my phone (with a extraordinary bright LCD display screen) in the dark and use it to guide my sleepy ass down the stairs to check on the fuse jumper. We had an emergency light connected next to our fuse box (thanks to the previous owner) that enable me to check for power trip. Unfortunately, our fuse did not tripped. It was Tenaga who screwed up again!

I opened the door to check on our neighbors and saw something weird. My neighbor on my left still has electricity supply while the one on my right has gone without. It seems that some TNB guy must have thought that it would be funny to wire up our residential area in such a chaotic manner. As I look further, there are a few houses located at the same row as mine are without power supply, and the same goes for the row opposite our house.

“What in heaven’s name is going on around here?”, I asked.

I got on my cell and dialed ‘15454’. In case you don’t already know, that is the TNB complaint number. I got it during our last blackout, which lasted for 6 hours from midnight.

Me: Hello! Tenaga?
Lady: Yeah, apa jadi?
Me: Rumah
saya tak ada electric lah.. baru saja..
Lady: Apa number telefon
rumah awak?
Me: Saya tak ada telefon kat rumah lah..
Lady: Apa nombor handphone awak?
Me: 012 30xx xxx
Lady: Mr
Kepala Telur ke?
Me: Yah! Saya.
Lady: Itu Taman Wangsa Permai ke? Oh! Kita baru saja dapat complain dari sana jugak. Kita akan hantar orang pergi check.
Me: OKOK… thank you ah!
Lady: sama..

It seems I am not the first one to call, some kiasu people must have dialed as soon as their lights went out without even bother to check further. I went back up to the room and wake J up to tell her about it. She thought it was our son’s normal feeding routine again as she bare her breast open (laubehiut!). I wake her up further and told her what was going on. She got up and went looking for candles while I searched for a mini-fan that was given to me by my brother from US. I use the fan to keep Little Skywalker cool as he has low heat tolerance like his father. We were lucky as the air-condition was on for a few hours before the power was cut.

After 30 minutes of lying around on the bed with no sign of TNB personnel coming, I suggested that we spent the night at my parents, after all, they are just 15 minutes drive away. J agreed and started packing our working clothes for the next day. J carried Little Skywalker to the car while I carried the bag and lock up our house. I also made sure that all of our electrical appliances are switched off so that they won’t get burnt out by the unstable current when the electricity is back (tips for everyone!).

As I was about to get up the running car and close the door, my next door neighbor (the one who suffered the same fate as us) shouted, “Heh! The power’s back again!”. Geee.. if only I have known that we getting out of our house would get our power back, we would have done so as soon as it went off!

It was already 12.30am, J and I slowly dragged our sorry asses back into the house again with our bags and went back to our air-conditioned room. I guess some heavy snoring and cursing must have came out of the room later.

The silver lining that we could see was, our fat Little Skywalker, who inherited J’s piggy genes, slept soundly through the whole fiasco.

Thanks (for the fast-but-not-so-prompt response) but no thanks (for screwing up in the first place) to TNB!

Jotted down by Egghead :: at around 10/13/2005 09:22:00 AM :: and invited 18 Blah(s):