Ah, April.
The first thing that pops into
your mind when you think of April: Poissen d'Avril, in other words, April Fool’s Day. That one passed
right by me this year; I had more pressing problems at hand.
Someone up in the government had
decided that the road that led to our home was far too narrow, and since it was
a borderline main road of sorts, it needed some widening.
Good news, definitely. Transform
a single lane into a double lane, and I’d personally find the chances of a head
on collision reduced by probably fifty percent when I get behind the wheel.
(I’m not a math guy, that’s a rough, uncalculated estimate).
In any case, I should have been
overjoyed.
I was, of course. Until I came
home and tried turning the laptop on. That was when I realized there was no
electricity. And of course, my laptop’s battery was pretty much expired; all it
could afford to give me was thirty seconds if the power cut out while I was
using it. Just enough time to hit hibernate and start thinking (yet again) about
saving up for a new battery.
Why no electricity? Simple. They
were widening the road, and all the streetlights and light posts needed to be
shifted to make room for the asphalt. Alrighty then, no electricity during the
day, and since we were promised lights once it began to get dark, I didn’t mind
it that much. One day without my laptop, maybe I could finally get a bit of
reading done after a long while.
Then, I was washing up after
lunch when the water started to slow to a trickle before stopping completely.
Believe it or not, some bozo had broken the water mains leading to our section
of road. Now, we and our neighbors had no electricity, nor water.
Still not that bad. Livable,
surely.
Then the final blow fell. As I
passed her on the way down to my room, Mum commented that the phone lines were
down, too. I said, “Bummer,” and continued on. No phone lines, not the worst
that could happen. We had mobile phones, after all.
