Back to the eighties

My Ahn'Ahna jew M'Ahniex entry yesterday, quoted by Mark Vella's Xifer blog was a reminder of the eighties - the decade that gave us so much! An entry about Malta's unreliable power supply posted yesterday in candlelight by MaltaGirl is another reminder of those formative years:

The power cut started at 7:20pm and it's now *checks mobile* 8pm. I am sitting at the dining room table studying Finite Element Analysis by candlelight (the candles from my Advent wreath) and blogging the old-fashioned way - in longhand. Our whole block is without power but we have no idea about how widespread the cut is. The next village to the north has power, as does the one to the east, but Ghadira (miles away) doesn't!

In First Year, we spend a month at the EneMalta training centre in Marsascala during the summer. Most of it was a complete waste of time and money, but it had its interesting moments. I enjoyed learning different ways to splice overhead power lines, and I distinguished myself by injuring myself twice: once I burnt my ankle (was arc-welding while wearing shorts, and my nylon sock caught fire) and another time I cut my knee on the metal shielding of an underground cable while learning how to splice it (I still have the scar). Anyway, while in training, one of the instructors brought out a map of Malta's grid system, showing all the substations and how they are linked together. (It was a biiiiiiig map!)

At times like these, I wish I could have one of those maps and see exactly where was affected :-) Wouldn't like to be one of the engineers and technicians currently scrambling to locate and fix the fault, though...