Power Loss

Our current housesitting gig is in the apartment above the Campus Ministry building that the Southern Baptists have about half a block from the University of Guam. So, this morning we were taking a walk across campus, enjoying the fantastic view of the Pacific Ocean, and suddenly all the campus diesel generators kicked on (they're loud).

We were without power for a couple of hours because of substation failures. The interesting thing is that it was no big deal. I turned on the car radio to hear what the problem was -- not a mention -- even though a large portion of the island was affected. Later, when the magic electricity started running through the cables again I checked the newspaper website and they had a few paragraphs mentioning that there was a failure. But no one bothered to update the story to say it had come back on.

I'm not sure, yet, whether people see infrastructure failures as no big deal -- hardly worth mentioning -- or if they've adopted such a fatalistic outlook on these things that they no longer give themselves permission to be annoyed at how poorly things are run.

Maybe it's a little of both.