Plain Lie

Before I moved into the house over one year ago , I was told that there would never be any blackout in this residential area - Pondok Indah - though it might be commonplace elsewhere. Well, I have lost count of the number of occasions that I have been annoyed by the intermittent sessions of blackout over the year.

When I decided to install an in-house power generator after the dramatic flood in Jakarta six months ago, I was again advised that there was no such need to do so, as there would never be any flooding or blackout in Pondok Indah. Though my landlord was right about the flooding after all, I knew that he was wrong about the blackout, so I insisted on the generator and he helped us with it.

But the trick about initiating to use the in-house power generator is that when a blackout struck, we could never know how long it would last, from 5 to 60 minutes from our experience. It was such a hassle to start the generator, far from simply turning on a switch, and it thunders like a speedboat motor. We applied it twice since, including once last night, thinking it would be a blatant defeat of purpose and lost opportunities for the thing to deliver its value by lying idly there otherwise, though the blackout on both occasions turned out to be short.

Despite this nuisance, my landlord is a nice guy and his house is comfortably nice after all.