Ever had dinner by mobile phone light?

We’ve all had dinner by candlelight at some stage – for romantic reasons, for blackout reasons, for fun reasons. And so it was that tonight, if I’d had candles, I would have had my chilli gobi, roti and naan dinner by candlelight. In the absence of candles though, it was dinner by the intermittent (auto shut off) light of my mobile phone. At first, my response to the lack of light when I arrived home at 9.50pm (yes, we’d had one heck of a day in the office, with matters prospectus, application, logo, roadshow itinerary and a host of other “bits” which would have been the substance of tonight’s blog otherwise) was simply to turn 180 degrees to the “power switch” that Raju and Ajith had only explained to me the night before.

This switch, to be used when there is a power outage, is to be turned 180 degrees also in an anticlockwise direction to provide a connection to the one fan and one light that would be powered by the back up generator. What Raju and Ajith had neglected to mention (or in fairness, probably weren’t aware of) was which light and which fan would work. As it happened, after some trial and error, I discovered that it was the fan in my bedroom, along with one of the lights there.

My thoughts were turning to a quiet series of handfuls of roti and gobi, naan and gobi, interspersed with gulps of water as I read The Historian (a book about vampires rather than historians per se but engaging nonetheless) and I had begun this, sitting on the bed with the various components neatly arrayed in front of me, when both the fan and the light expired. It seems that there is no guarantee of an extended period of one light and one fan.

I duly finished dinner, pressing phone buttons with one hand and gathering up the makings with the other, and sitting amused at the experience. I followed this with a big swig or seven of water (no light also means no fans), anticipating that I would now log on to the internet via my battery driven computer, to regale all and sundry (well at least you, dear reader) with this tale. But the tale doesn’t finish there – what now pops up from the Tata Indicom Dialer is the message that “The remote computer did not respond. …..”. Instead, I sit here on the bed typing a word document so that I don’t lose the flavour of this experience in the sleeping on it, with my fingers gliding over the keys lit only by the luminescence of the screen which is also reflecting these words to me.

Today is a day of things left undone – things at work, things at home, things on the computer. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to log on, upload and move on to finish some of those things. In the meantime, I guess there’s nothing else for it but to “shut down, turn off, until the morning light” (thanks to The Little River Band for that one).

Postscript: Next morning and power’s back on. It’s entirely likely that the extended darkness was my own doing – there’s a trip switch for the power that was, well, tripped; push the green button in and the lights (and fans) work, so I think my learning also has just been extended. Ah well, I’ll know for the next time.