[imagesource: Wikimedia Commons]

I wonder if the creators of EskomSePush are a little torn.

Yes, it’s great when your app user base continues to grow (it recently passed five million downloads) and people are checking in multiple times a day.

On the flip side, we’re doing so because our national power supplier is falling apart and we’re trying to figure out if we can actually cook a meal later that day or must work around having no power between 6PM and 8:30PM.

I love waking up on a Monday to warnings of “extreme load shedding” for the coming week. It really puts a pep in my step.

Two days ago, EskomSePush sent out this tweet:

It’s finally time. You have to tell your friends and family to download the app – you can’t keep telling them when they’ll have loadshedding 🤯 https://t.co/GnyUroAjWg pic.twitter.com/Cx3VJIV7Lw

— EskomSePush (ESP) (@EskomSePush) November 21, 2022

I wholeheartedly agree, after seeing upwards of 10 Boomers posting to the local Facebook group asking for load shedding updates.

Download the app (here, it’s easy) and leave Facebook for what’s really important, like moaning about people not picking up their dog’s shit and so on.

Anyway, that image in the tweet above is worth closer examination. MyBroadband is on the case:

[It showed] Eskom had implemented 2,881 hours of load-shedding in 2022 by 17:29 on Monday, 21 November.

That is equal to 120 days of load-shedding, which works out to about four months of continuous rotational power outages.

Image: Twitter / EskomSePush

With load-shedding set to continue for at least the next few days, it is likely that South Africans will have endured load-shedding being in effect for well over a third of the year.

Here’s the real kicker of how bad things have become – over the whole of last year, we had ‘just’ 1 153 hours of load-shedding, which is roughly 48 days.

Going back to 2020’s numbers, we’re on course to quadruple the number of days we had load shedding that year.

While we contemplate how to cook dinner without power, President Cyril Ramaphosa wined and dined with King Charles III yesterday.

He enjoyed a choice between grilled brill (a fish) with wild mushrooms, truffles and sorrel sauce or Windsor pheasant stuffed with artichokes, quince compote, and port sauce.

Let them eat pheasant!

 

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A post shared by The Royal Family (@theroyalfamily)

[source:mybb]