Out(r)age…

Yesterday saw one of the first big wind storms of the year here at the southern end of Vancouver Island. As so often happens at this time of the year many trees lost branches as a result (in the case of deciduous trees because they have not yet shed their leaves) and our electricity provider –  BC Hydro – were kept fully employed with investigating and repairing damaged power lines (regular readers will know that here in BC most power supplies are carried on poles rather than buried underground as they are in the south east of the UK).

Somewhat annoyingly we lost power here for about three and a half hours during the afternoon, at a point at which I was hoping to prepare for my class today. As the light faded in the early evening I cooked dinner on the gas barbecue outside and we had just started to dine by candle light when the power was eventually restored.

The reason that this was particularly annoying was because BC Hydro had already been in touch with us a week or so back to inform us of a scheduled outage today (for ‘system upgrades’) at a time that clashed with the start of my class. The relevance is – of course – that because I now teach exclusively from my studio at home, the loss of power prevents me completely from so doing. I had arranged with my students for a later start for the class but when I awoke this morning it did occur to me that BC Hydro might have rescheduled the outage as a result of their engineers having worked such long shifts yesterday. I called them to check. After a lengthy rumination by the call-centre chappie (who clearly had no real idea what was going on) I was told categorically that the outage would indeed take place.

Somehow inevitably – it did not do so!

I even went out on my bicycle at one point looking for a BC Hydro crew, but none was to be found.

In the end I started my class late and they had to put up with my grumbling about how – wherever one lives in the world – it is impossible to find efficient service industries that do what they say they are going to do – when they say they are going to do it.

I am fully prepared now for the power to go out suddenly and without warning in the middle of my next class…