Balance of power

Sitting in my living room in a pool of my own sweat and using the last 20 percent of my laptop’s battery life to write is no easy task.

There is no light. There wasn’t any when I got home. You see our generator isn’t working, it hasn’t been working for about a week but we have had light for a week so I guess we weren’t bothered until today.

As I sit here playing music, my laptop taunts me with that irritating yellow sign of an exclamation mark screaming 10% battery power left (as if I didn’t already know). The driver went to get a mechanic to fix the generator and we are waiting anxiously for his return.

So, the mechanic finally arrives and is irritated that we have called him to do extra work at the end of his official workday, (If someone asked me to do another 2 hrs of work...I’d be pretty cheesed off as well).

After about an hour of fiddling he says there is a fault in the radiator, carburettor, fan belt, coil (I’m not sure but all these words seem to be only ones that mechanics say) and it would cost a certain amount to fix it.

My father haggles and gives the money for it to be bought; the mechanic goes for what seems like an eternity and then reappears, tinkled with the generator until I hear the sweet hum of success. I can almost feel the fan blowing over me but my dream is brought to a screeching halt when he changes over and ... no power.

Not enough petrol he says, more money is given and off he goes for about 20 minutes. More tinkling, another hum and another change over... power for 10 seconds and then it’s off.

Words that would make a sailor blush flow through my mind as he grumbles back outside to see what is wrong. 10, 20, 30 minutes and then I hear the hum again; I’m not as excited this time, once bitten, twice shy. He changes over and there it is: the twirling of the fan in the living room and the re-acknowledgement of a DVD in my DVD player. I plug in my dead laptop, start frantically charging my phones and before my DSTV can even stop scanning, my dad pops his head into my room and says “turn off your A/C, they’ve brought light”. If I needed a reason to be driven to drink...