The Great Singapore Blackout

Firstly, WTF???!

I wanted to sleep, and was on the verge thereof. Closed my eyes even. A split-second later, com­plete silence. No air-con, no PC fan hum. I cursed the elec­tri­cian and his newly installed power switch­board, then looked out the win­dow and realised, ok, the whole neigbourhood’s a lit­tle dark. Nair mind, Teo Chee Hean’s my neigh­bour. Power sure come back one. Defence Min­is­ter leh.

Sev­eral SMS exchanges later, it dawns on me that this is some­thing big. My farder the con­spir­acy the­o­rist said, ‘I think sab­o­tage you know?!’; My mum, sis and bro-in-law, who between them have twenty seven torch­lights, turn them all on. My nephew screams for the whole fam­ily to muster round his bed. My brother reports via sms that all is still well in Chi­na­town, and that the offi­cial expla­na­tion of a gas dis­rup­tion to the power sta­tion is com­plete BS.

The power’s just come back on, and after two hours of being lost in the unpow­ered wilder­ness, I quickly turn on my com­puter, hop­ing to log on. I can’t. I write this on my trusty offline blog­ging tool.

Two hours of a power fail­ure and my whole life turns upside down.

I’ve taken the very des­per­ate mea­sure of tak­ing out my phone’s SIM card and putting it into the Nokia D11 wifi/gprs/gsm combo thingie and stuck it into my com­puter just so I can get online and fig­ure out what the hell’s wrong with my inter­net con­nec­tion through SCV Max­on­line. Fuck!