One of the disadvantages of Adjusting My Sleep Cycle so that I'm awake during the day as opposed to being awake at night is that we never have unscheduled power outages at night unless there's a storm, such as Typhoon Milenyo.
The first time I wrote about Brownouts, I gave the Philippine Utility Department (PUD) too much credit. I said that brownouts occur once a week as opposed to daily like they did back in the early eighties. I definitely gave them too much credit when I wrote More About Brownouts.
Short term brownouts (less than two hours) seem to be taken well by most residents, even myself. Anything more than that leads to water outages, like I described when I talked about the local Municipal Water.
Near the beginning of April, I wrote about An 8-Hour Brownout. It was the first of many. Since then, PUD has had numerous unscheduled power outages during the day. Sometimes they're only for a few minutes and other times they're for eight to ten hours. Needless to say, anything over an hour results in the fact that we have no water supply until about an hour after power is restored.
At least in the eighties and nineties, PUD would broadcast a public service announcement on the radio (and sometimes add a news item to the local TV news broadcast) when a brownout would occur that was either scheduled or unscheduled. They don't even try to do that now.
Today was one of those days where I was stuck in a position of not being able to even use my laptop to write while waiting for power to be restored. The battery only lasts about an hour if I leave the monitor portion on. That's not enough time for me. My DSL connection requires power, so research is not an option either. Being as how it was hot and humid, I just kept getting fatigued when I was indoors and spent most of the day outside where at least there was a breeze blowing.
If this kind of stuff happened in any major American city, there would be a riot and a lynching of the people in charge. Here in the Philippines, the local people have been abused for so long that it doesn't seem to bother them too much. The utility departments treat electricity and piped-in water as luxuries when they aren't. I know, with my limited influence, that I can't make a difference in their attitudes. Perhaps I should hire some local Filipinos to go terrorize some government offices on a regular basis. Would it make a difference? Probably not.
