In the Dark...

So we have been living without electricity for 5 whole days.

It all started last Friday when we got home from working. It turned out that when we moved in we were supposed to change the name on the account, but we never did it. We tried quite a few times, but we were given about three different numbers and either they didn’t work or no one answered. We should have continued, but of course we didn’t. In the end we made it 4 and half months without a problem.

We called our landlady and got a different number. When I called that one I finally got through. I changed all of information, and they told us that it would be 48 hours until it was turned back on.

Everything in our apartment is electric including the water heater and our stove, so we had no way to cook food or a place to store it. We put our refrigerated stuff out on the balcony to stay cool, and took very quick freezing cold showers. We were quite proud of ourselves on Sunday night because we had made it a whole weekend without electricity.

But by Monday morning we still didn’t have any electricity, so we called again and they told us that 48 hours does not include the weekend. (I am not sure why they didn’t tell us that before. I guess in France it is assumed that people don’t work on the weekend.) They said someone would come out and fix it by Tuesday afternoon. When we got home yesterday we still didn’t have any lights, so we called again and this time they said they didn’t have an open appointment until February 21, which didn’t go down too well with us. The poor lady got an earful from Sarah. She said she would put an urgent notice on our name, so hopefully it would get done faster.

Today a man called and said someone had come by yesterday and fixed the line downstairs, so there was something wrong with our apartment. We then had to call our landlady and she came by and called the people up again because there was nothing wrong with our fuse box. They then sent a repairman out, and they found that in fact when someone came by yesterday they didn’t actually turn the current back on…so they flipped the switch and just like that we had LIGHT!

It took 120 hours, 40 euros worth of phone calls, 16 candles, and lots of spoiled food but we made it through. It was such a headache. Granted we could have figured out the whole name change thing earlier, but it was still very drawn out.

In the end I also found I can still be creative when it comes to finding stuff to do, and that it is still possible to go five days without Internet. Difficult but still possible.




Playing Yahtzee by candle light.