This week, I got another reminder that I have adjusted to life in the U.S. Wednesday morning about 6 AM, there was a loud pop and the electricity went out. My immediate expectation was that it would come back on in a couple of minutes. Only after it had been out for thirty minutes did I realize it was an actual outage that I probably needed to report.
Growing up, I never would have had an expectation of the electricity coming back on immediately. In fact, I would have been pleasantly surprised if it did. Most of the time, it was more of a hope that it would come back on before everything in the fridge and freezer spoiled. There was no point of calling anything in either. I got used to studying by candle light and sleeping in pitch black. To this day, I have trouble sleeping if there is the slightest hint of light.
Apparently the transformer close by tripped. The fact that there was a computer that could tell me this based only on my zip code is pretty impressive. They also told me it would be back online by 8 AM…and it was.
(for those reading this who are confused by the title of this blog, NEPA is the Nigerian Power Authority or as we liked to say Never Ever Power Again. I assume you can get the Pigeon English by context. If not, feel free to ask.)
For some bizarre reason my parents do not like to report outages. As a result, one time in high school our electricity was out for hours and hours. I finally informed my parents that everyone else in the neighborhood had lights but us. So they FINALLY called. Only to discover that our house and one other (unoccupied) was coming off of a certain pole that had been knocked over that day by a car but wasn’t reported.Since then I’ve had no problems reporting issues!