The power outage mostly didn’t directly affect me at work, because I work for a major hosting company and ISP and thus we have big-ass UPS systems and generators and shit.
I was mostly bewildered by the traffic chaos that ensued.
You see I had to drive crosstown to the Sky Tower, early in the morning, in the rain, while the traffic lights were out, and thus found that people in Auckland cannot actually drive sanely without traffic lights. No, instead they gun cars into little openings trusting that the other cars will, in fact, see them and stop. They yell, and not just the usual yelling that only reaches other people inside your car[1], I’m talking yelling out the window at people. They try to do a U-Turn across multiple lanes of stationary traffic. They go feral. They kill the pig, and they drink his blood. Come back summer, so I can walk to work again.
Annoyingly, none of the coffee places near work had UPS systems and generators. Bizarre!
Something related that’s also mildly amusing is that various people I know, and various politicians not in government, were blaming this power cut … on the government. Now, I have some issues with the current government, but seriously, power networks are complex, and complex stuff breaks. I guess the government could legislate that Transpower must have three layers of redundancy at every point between a hydro lake and the wall socket that John Q Public has his Flowbee plugged into, but then electricity would cost stupid money and the network would be even more complex. And complex stuff breaks.
Summary: Politics, and politicians, suck more than power cuts. There’s a lesson there for all of us.
[1] Aucklands unofficial motto is “Pick a fucking lane!”