Cash not card

and how many people reading this could actually pay for something that way?

The "IT outage" should be a wake up call for all of us. We press buttons and flick switches and we expect things to happen...and happen as they should happen.

What happened yesterday was not a short term power failure. It was an apparently catastrophic break down of communication systems, systems we rely on for just about everything.

I have lived without electricity. I was born in a tiny rural "town" which was really no more than a village in Upover terms. There was a severe housing shortage at the time. Building materials were in very short supply and so were the workers to build them. In rural areas this was even worse. The Senior Cat had just married and now needed somewhere else to live. He had been sharing a "room" - an enclosed verandah - with another male teacher but that could obviously not continue!

My parents were offered a galvanised iron "shack" on top of a hill. The farmer offered to cover the dirt floor with linoleum and put up a partition so that there were two rooms rather than one. My parents moved in. It took me nearly three years to arrive and they must have been worried about taking a baby into those conditions. It was much too warm in summer and much too cold in winter. It was windy almost all the time...and there was no electricity. I am not sure how Mum coped - but she did. She even did days of relief teaching and I would be cared for by one of the woman "down the hill".  

Just towards the end of the time there the Senior Cat, the farmer and a couple of other locals connected the windmill which pumped the water to a power supply of sorts. If it was windy enough there was some power but it was not reliable. My parents were moved shortly after that into government supplied housing in the town. The house, a fibro-asbestos one, is still there. At the time it seemed like the height of luxury. There were four such houses in one row and four more backing on to them in another row...and they all had electricity. Despite that we still relied on a wood burning stove for cooking and heating.

Fast forward another decade and the Senior Cat and my mother were appointed as the teachers in a two teacher school in a very remote area. Once again they found themselves without power - and without running water as well. We spent the first six, perhaps seven, months of our stay there with no electricity. Mum cooked on a wood-burning stove and did the washing by boiling water in a copper and wringing it out with an old fashioned mangle. The Senior Cat chopped the wood and brought in buckets of water from the "temporary" tap which was just outside the property. (The water came in an "inch" pipe across the top of the ground and was too hot to put your hands into on many hot days.) My parents prepared lessons at night under the light of kerosene burning lamps. We children simply went to bed when it got too dark to do anything.

Eventually we did get electricity - in the form of a 32v power plant. It was Brother Cat's task to check the batteries each morning. He was diligent about that but the power was still unreliable. We could not quite believe it when, on moving two years later, we went to a house where you could simply reach out and push something and a light came on. Three years later though we were back to a 32v plant for another four years.  

I think it has made all of us more aware and hopefully more appreciative of our power supply. Perhaps it is also why I always carry some cash with me. I have never had a credit card. I do have a debit card but that small amount of cash is designed to "get me home" or "get something essential". If I had needed to go shopping yesterday in that foul weather I could have bought milk or bread in a "cash only" lane. It might be "old fashioned" but it has worked for centuries.