Last night we were sitting in the dark for nearly 2 hours. Now there is nothing untoward about this and Durban Electricity reflected a technical outage. So should we think this is true and technical problems and cable faults are to blame?

Well I would have, except that we were out last monday at roughly the same time for about 3 and a half hours then. And on reflection the week previous to that. I phoned them then, to hear the same vague replies to my questions.

When you phone the Durban Electricity dept, the initial answering service gives a list of areas that are out to tell that they are aware of the problem. I have phoned within a short time of the outage to find that our area is all ready on the list. If you have the patience, you can hear a looooonnnnngggg list of problem areas.

Then I hear Pretoria goes down suburb by suburb during the week - sometimes some areas are out for up to 8 hours at a time. People from Jhb tell the same story. Cape town guys seem to be usually in the dark so I have not heard of an outage problem from that region.

So....are we being subjected to load shedding - this time without a schedule and without warning and being treated like mushrooms again?