Not reading Chinese will make your milk go sour
I have less than half of my iBook battery left — 49 percent to be exact — so I will keep this short.
Power went out in my building at around 7:30am. This has never happened before. It’s been nearly three hours, and I still have no power.
This is not good. My office is in my apartment. It requires electricity to live. So do the apartment’s air conditioners (the low temperatures in Shanghai have been around 80 recently). The refrigerator requires electricity, too (I think I can actually hear the milk curdling as I write this).
But there didn’t seem to be any panic in the building this morning. No one else really seemed to notice or care about the blackout. As my girlfriend left for work, and walked down thirteen flights of stairs — no electricity, no elevators — she passed not one sweaty soul doing the same thing. She didn’t see anyone working to fix the problem downstairs, either, even though everyone in the building, including those responsible for maintaining it, obviously had to realize we had been without electricity for more than an hour. Weird.
It’s as if they weren’t surprised by the problem. It’s as if they expected it. It’s as if they knew it was going to happen.
07.09.2004, 11:53 AM · Observations · Comments (10)
