Writer's block & Eskom

All great writers suffer from writer's block at one point or another in their illustrious careers. I am no different (aside from not being a great writer, that is). My mental wheels have temporarily stopped turning, so I am stooping to posting other people's great work on my blog. This is one of my favourite South African cartoons, Madam & Eve. The authors have been one of the few groups of people managing to make money out of the powercuts (along with those selling generators, wood-fire pizza and gas cookers). Enjoy:

Power cuts boost productivity... by preventing procrastination

Yikes! It has been a long while since I last blogged. Why, you may ask (or not. i suppose it depends entirely on whether or not you actually care). Well, if you're in South Africa you probably know the answer... Eskom. And for those of you who are not from this glorious land of sunny days and dark, electricity-less nights, that is not a rude Afrikaans word. Although it should be.

Eskom is our national power supplier, but they're not doing a very good job of supplying electricity to us at the moment. Not that it's their fault - they have been warning our government for years that we needed to invest money in building new capacity. But, as President Mbeki has admitted, the top dogs did not listen, and so now we are stuck with rolling blackouts everyday, usually twice a day, around the country.

All of this rambling about the uselessness of politicians and utilities is merely background to explain my latest excuse for delayed blogging... "load shedding" as Eskom calls it. This annoying and highly disruptive policy of turning off our electricity at random intervals during the day does have its plus side though... It has put an end to my procrastination. See, to make my deadlines I am forced to sit down immediately as I get into the office and do as much as possible while the PC is still on, as well as copying everything onto a USB stick to use on the laptop while the power is down and drawing up very organised 'to do' lists of people I need to call and things I need to do that don't require electricity for those two-hour sessions. When the power is off and I have no internet or email access, I simply go through my lists and feel very good at being able to tick things off.

So while Eskom's little switch-flicking games may halt the work on the Gau-Train project, lose millions of Rands for the mining companies, and generally wreak havoc and mean that nobody can get a good cuppa, at least little old me is doing just fine.

The only down side (and some will debate that this is a negative at all) is that there are long gaps between blogs.