Powerless in the capital

I love New Zealand, my adoptive country, and I love Wellington, the city that I now call home. However, every now and again, something happens to remind me that I'm living in the most southerly capital city in the world. Today it was an hour long power outage beginning at 3.30pm on an otherwise ordinary Autumn day.

Department stores were plunged into darkness, credit card machines flickered and died, trolley buses ground to a halt, and people stuck in stalled lifts sang Kumbaya while waiting to be rescued. The Kiwis dealt with all of this with the calm, philosophical, sense of humour that made we want to live here in the first place. Although I did find it a little alarming that ambulances had to be scrambled to transfer patients from the Wellington Hospital intensive care unit after back-up power generators failed!

Throughout the outage comments were flowing in to one of the online news sites from people using laptops and mobile phones. The comments were a testament to the stoical sense of humour of the Kiwis. My particular favourite reflected the sometimes ambivalent relationship between the inhabitants of New Zealand's North and South Islands. To get the point you need to know that most power is generated in the South Island, far more is consumed in the North, and that Wellington is situated on the southern coast of the North Island. The comment was posted by a user going by the name of South Island and it read:

"Attention Wellington, we have cut the cable, you're on your own now! Good luck."