I feel like every post needs a photo, so just imagine that this monkey is irritated by the power outage…
Even though there isn’t much to say about this, I feel like it needs to be shared. Since I try to keep up with my unique European experiences, I truly think this fits the bill. Yesterday, as I was sitting at my desk at work, editing yet another article, listening to Olympic competition in the background, and otherwise just doing my thing, the power went out – in the entire building. Not so strange, you say? Keep reading.
Luckily, the building has generators, so we were given a little light and if we were hooked up to the Internet line and not wireless, we could continue working on our laptops. However, about thirty minutes later, the Internet line went down. Now, I’m no technical expert, so I can’t explain why I had the Internet for awhile and then why it went away, but it did. With no Internet, we officially had nothing to do. It was at that moment that I realized how utterly dependent we all are on technology. People started to wander around the office aimlessly until we decided to pass the time by playing some card games. Surely, the power would come back on any time – it was the middle of the day.
That’s what we thought until we saw people pouring out of the building and shops closing up outside. Apparently, the power went out over the whole of Gibraltar. Read that again: the ENTIRE COUNTRY OF GIBRALTAR had zero power. Restaurants, shopping centers, dry cleaners, grocery stores…the list goes on and on. When you think of Gibraltar as more than a little peninsula on the southern tip of Spain, it starts to set in just how enormous this is. When news finally spread to us that it wouldn’t be back on for quite awhile, the office called it a day and we made the long and slow trek home. Unfortunately, we drove in yesterday so that we could pick up our dry cleaning, therefore we were stuck waiting in a long border queue with the rest of the masses trying to escape the dark isolation. Matt made a couple jokes about how the Spanish finally found the major electricity line and cut it to piss off Gibraltar – I’m not counting out that possibility just yet…
Today we have power and so it was back to work in the office. It is just so interesting to live in this little place that is just so unique and observe how a situation that would normally affect only a city in the United States, could affect an entire population.
