Planned Power Outage

The other day we had a "planned power outage" in the office. Sounds exciting, I know! Ukarumpa (along with many PNG cities) runs off of electricity generated at a nearby dam. However, this is not a particularly reliable power source, so we also have several generators for back up power. It is an extremely common occurrence for the power to go out and then within a few seconds the generator kicks in and everything comes back on. On Wednesday, our brilliant electrical guys were switching many buildings (including our office) from one generator to another (for many very good reasons that they could explain better than I can), so we lost power for over an hour.

You never realize how much you depend on something until you lose it! When the power goes out, our computer network goes down, and when the network is down we can't access any of the files that are saved on the network . . . and what do you do in a survey office when you can't access any of the survey reports you are working on? I know, you save the document onto your desktop before the planned power outage . . . but somehow we always forget that losing power means we are going to lose the network as well, and my computer battery isn't really up to running for an hour anyway. So we found some good "manual labour" to do while we waited . . . we had pictures from previous surveys hanging up all around the room but paper tends to get a bit soggy with the humidity here, so we took them all down, "de-sticky-tacked" them (do you think I could get that word accepted in a dictionary?) and got them laminated. Maybe I will show you a picture sometime once we get them all back up.