Wednesday 5 September 2007

Power: The Ultimate Motivator!

Electricity – Rwanda doesn’t have half enough of it!

And one of the problems in modernising the government administration is that when your work goes computer based, and there’s no electricity, your productivity goes to zero. This might be tolerable in the capital, as these days we very rarely get serious power cuts in during office hours, but there are district offices who routinely shut up shop at midday. Even when there is power, I suspect I work as fast my internet connection these days – the faster it is, the more I do. Weird that one…

Its 3pm in KIST and I’ve got about an hour of battery on my laptop. After that if the power isn’t back up I’ll go home, like many others this afternoon. Of course we have a generator, it was on this morning…but it doesn’t seem to be working now. Maybe they ran out of petrol, maybe the whole city has (its not unusual for drivers to have to do a city tour to get a refill), god help us if is broken down….the procurement process will ensure we have no backup power for at least 6 months. Our PBX for internal telephones got fried in Feb and we’re still waiting and hoping.

I’ll just have to hope there is power at home. This is quite likely since I’m on the same supply line as the Presidents Office. I may actually have to do work, as it looks like rain and the satellite TV usually doesn’t work in a rainstorm. Just when you might need it most!

POST SCRIPT

The power did come back and eventually the Internet, which seemed to be run faster cause all the staff had buggered off. YAY!

2 comments:

Maurice said...

Need I point out the irony in you being left with only 1 hour of electricity to do work with, and still spending time blogging about it? :)

Bloggar said...

Argh, my blog stalker has arrived!

Surely I didn't do something as foolish as to give you the address of this site did I?