Prepay your life

South Africa is home to a phenomenon that I have only seen once before, in Houston, Texas, and which, at the time, made me laugh. Out loud. For weeks. In fact, until a few days ago, every time I thought about it, I cracked myself up.

Prepaid electricity.

I know, right?

Well, tonight Lillian and I discovered that prepaid life is no joke.

I woke up in the middle of the night (okay, 10, I was tired) to a constant beeping from somewhere near. I wasn’t sure what it was but when I tried to turn on the lights nothing worked. It took me a second to realize that what had happened. The alarm was beeping because the electricity ran out. Lillian had apparently realized it at about the same time and, half asleep, we were both prepared to wait it out until the morning. I went back to bed and lay there for about 30 seconds before I woke up and counted the many reasons that we couldn’t possibly wait until morning to get the lights back on. So began our adventure.

After luring Lillian out of bed with promises of mayhem in the morning, we headed outside to solve the two problems lying between us and light: the gate and the garage door. I was also terrified that we would get shot, what could look more suspicious than two black folks in sweats and using a cell phone flashlight to walk around a house?

We made our way through the backyard, into the garage and spent the next eight minutes or so figuring out how to unlock the garage manually. We finally spotted the little red switch at the top of the mechanical thingy, pulled it out, and opened the garage. Problem #1: solved!

Outside and using the car lights, we battled the gate for a good 15 minutes before I was ready to give up and call Mandy’s sister but Lill tenaciously worked on. She finally called the emergency number on the side of the electricity box in the garage and the man said there should be a manual override for the gate. 10 minutes later and she found it. Problem #2: check!

Looking as grubby as possible we drove to the gas station, presented our electricity slip, and paid 250 Rand (about $34) for electricity that should last us about 10-12 days. We got back home, I entered the 20 digit number into the box in the garage (where we got the emergency number) and pushed the arrow… ACCEPTED! Light flooded the house and garage and we were home free. Almost.

It turns out that once you manually override a gate and garage it’s almost impossible to get them to latch again and work electronically. After a lot of trying (and some swearing on Lill’s part) we gave up and decided to try again in the morning. We finally made our way inside and to bed. It’s a good thing the next day was Friday because we were wearing jeans while we crawled around on the ground trying to re-lock the gate before heading off to work.

Prepaid electricity. Who knew?

Travel well,
kat


Like this post? Subscribe for more travel tips, stories, and reviews!

Enter your Email






Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz