Some Dark Humour

South Africa is in the grip of nationwide electricity blackouts. So how are people coping? With humour, of course.

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South Africa's monopoly electricity supply utility, Eskom, has seemingly run out of capacity and is imposing what it calls “load shedding”. Err.. blackouts. The causes of this include:

• Grossly incompetent managers
• Looting of the utility on a massive scale
• Deciding to erect two enormous coal-fired power stations itself, with such enormous cost overruns they are now the most expensive such plants in the world
• The two new power station don't work.

This load shedding is done in stages. Stage 1 is where they shed 1000 MW. Stage 2 is 2000 MW and so on to Stage 4 which, you guessed it is the Armageddon-like 4000 MW.

The jokes started when Stage 4 was reached, and people wondered what would happen at Stage 5. But no sooner had the unthinkable been joked about, when Eskom played a trick on the public.

Yes, they started implementing Stages 5 & 6.

Another variant of this was:

But how would you light them anyway?

Still, people still take naughty selfies:

. . . and can still go out and have fun no matter what Stage we get to:

But that might not work:

And who would you have fun with?

Then Eskom really gets down to business:

Things turn uglier:

. . . and uglier:

It gets so bad, that eventually:

But, in the end, resistance is futile:

. . . and all hope is lost.

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Also posted on Weku, @tim-beck, 2019-03-22