Base to Kelly. What’s your 20?

Over the last several days I’ve received a number of emails, Facebook notifications and Skype messages asking, “WHERE ARE YOU?”  Apparently everyone that I normally communicate with is concerned that I am lost.  Rest assured; I know exactly where I am.  I just can’t tell you.  No, it’s not a secret.  “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate” a la Cool Hand Luke.

For the past week things have been unusually dicey around here.  More so than usual.  I know I’ve mentioned power outages and rolling blackouts in several previous posts.  But for the past 9 or 10 days the load-sharing as it is called here has really involved no sharing at all.  Instead it’s more of a no-load situation.  Yesterday I had no power in my house from the time I woke up around 6am until about 9:30pm.  The power came back on for about 5 minutes and then it was back off again.  I’m not sure when it came back in the middle of the night, but when I woke up this morning there was power.

When I woke up this morning to power I was thrilled.  Until I realized the Internet wasn’t working.  I couldn’t do any work at home, so I came to the office early only to find…. The Internet wasn’t working at UB either.  After four hours in the office I was finally able to connect to the Internet.  I checked my email and found the following message in my Inbox:

Colleagues,

Please note that throughout the day you may experience slow responses or limited access when working on the Internet.

We have been informed by Botswana Telecommunications Corporation (BTC) that they are experiencing problems due to a cut in the fibre at Karakubis where there is the line connecting Botswana to the world through Namibia, resulting in slow access.

We apologise for any inconvenience and will continue liaising with BTC to monitor the situation.

Thank you

Seretse Bagopi (Mr)

Deputy Director, Information Technology

University of Botswana

I’m so glad they EMAILED us to tell us the Internet wasn’t working.

So to recap, we get our power from South Africa and that’s not working out so well right now.  And I just learned today that we get our Internet from Namibia.  I’m not entirely sure why we get our Internet from Namibia.  A few months back a friend from Namibia sent me a postcard.  It took 51 days from the time he mailed the postcard for me to receive it.  Better late than never?  But if that’s how long a postcard takes, I can’t say I have a lot of hope for our Namibian Internet connection.

TIA.

By the way, I have been trying to upload this blog post for over two hours now.  The Internet keeps timing out and I keep losing all my work.  Thank goodness I wasn’t trying to post something with a photo!