After tropical storm “Milenyo” (international name “Xangsane”) hit last week, Metro Manila and other affected areas were plunged in darkness…well, at least during the night. That’s because most power lines were downed by fallen billboards and trees. Of course, some power cables got stolen during the height of the storm, believe it or not, but that’s another story. Anyway, all of this has resulted in zero electricty for most of us.
For the more privileged people (a.k.a rich people), they all trooped down to the nearest hotel to spend a night or two. The hotel was running on generators, but who cares, right? It’s an excuse to stay at hotel rather that newly built mansion.
Others preferred to just spend their day at the mall with gazillions of other people trying to escape the heat. If you can’t take the heat in your house, why not go enjoy a sweaty afternoon with others, right? My parents had to buy something from the mall the other day. To compensate for the lack of airconditioning, the mall management decided to put up large industrial fans at strategic places around the mall. May mom was standing near the vicinity of such a fan when one big sweaty foul smelling guy (as she described him), went in front of the fan, spread his arms, and just stood there. I could just imagine how that part of the mall suddenly became a candidate for a quarantine area. Jeez! I’ve seen (and unfortunately smelled) people like this and they have no sense of consideration to others.
As for my wife and me, we decided to stay home during this power outage. We had happily played our Gameboys during that stormy day. But as luck would have it, the batteries ran out. We could have brought the Gameboys to work the day after the storm so we could charge them, but I convinced her not to because I was pretty confident that power would be back by the time we got back from work. Naturally, I was wrong.
We did go last Saturday out because we had to buy supplies. First, we went to the ATM. But because of the power outage, the ATMs around the neighborhood were all offline. The ATM has become a sort of high-tech piggy bank for us Filipinos. We are now totally lost without access to such machines. Other people from the neighborhood were checking out each and every ATM to see if they’d be lucky enough to find one still operating. Kind of like trying out every slot machine at a casino to see if you’ll hit the jackpot.
Realizing it would be futile to get cash at that point, we went on to the supermarket anyway and decided that we’d just use my credit card. After getting a whole cartload of supplies, we were surpised not to find too many people at the checkout counters. There were a couple of customers ahead of us when we overheard the cashier say that Mastercard “was offline”. Meaning we can’t use Mastercard to make purchases. My wife and I looked at each other worriedly. My credit card was a Mastercard. Then the cashier quickly added that Visas were okay. I smiled halfway and asked my wife if she’d brought along her Visa. Luckily, she did. Whew! That was close! I now had a full smile on my face. After spending an hour filling up that shopping cart, it would have been a waste to leave everything at the counter. At least we didn’t search for grocery items in a dimly lit supermarket for nothing.
Of course, having a blackout during a weekend did have it’s advantages. It gave us a chance to go low-tech for a while. Without the TV or the computer, it was back to basics: eat and sleep with a little storytelling in between. We did enjoy the candlelight dinners (all four consecutive nights of them).
But we did learn something from four days without electricity: we are so blessed to have every hi-tech electronic gadget we have at our house. The fridge, freezer, microwave, toaster, TV, CD player, DVD player, the list goes on, are there to enhance our lives. Our lives should revolve around these things. We can always do without them. Spending quality time with our loved ones, just talking or eating together, is what life is really all about. Let’s not wait for the next blackout to do it.