Electrical blues

When we did extensions to our home a couple of years ago, we required an upgrade to our electrical system. The municipality forced us to change to their shiny new prepaid system. At the time we were not too keen on the idea because we knew we would be at risk of forgetting to top up. That happened a few times and we quickly got into the habit of checking the meter and topping up timeously.

Last night I noticed that we were running low, so I used my cell phone to attempt to purchase some units from iBuy. To my dismay, I received an SMS from their server indicating that the municipal server was down and that they were unable to issue me with a token. Dump and I jumped in the car and raced down to the 7-Eleven on Main road only to be given the same story there.

The iBuy site had a notice on it that said that the server would be back up by 21h00. As we were critically low by then, I ran our generator (thank goodness we have one) until we went to bed. I kept checking the iBuy site until about 22h00 and it seems the municipality kept moving the goal posts.



This morning iBuy had posted a new notice on their site with no indication of when the server might be available. They included a number to phone for "EMERGENCY electricity".

Now I know this is no fault of iBuy's - they are just an agent who sells tokens on behalf of the municipality, so I phoned the municipal "EMERGENCY" number and the lady who answered politely told me that there was no-one there who could issue me with a token because they had all worked until 3AM and had now gone home. They would be back in the office around 8 and they might be able to help me then.

I have been involved in IT for donkey's years and am very familiar with problems that keep one at work until all hours. I have worked countless all nighters on systems that are down, but I have never quit and gone home at 3AM with a system down and paying customers getting more and more irate!

Dump has just phoned the "EMERGENCY" number again and was told by the bright individual on the other end of the line: "Sorry maam, the main server is down. It has a virus so they are busy replacing hardware and we cannot issue any tokens." Clearly he has no clue what's going on!

So we have no electricity at home and no hope of getting any in the foreseeable future.

How on earth can a critical system like that have no backup infrastructure? This shocking service would never be tolerated by our customers. Why should we have to put up with it?