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The power finally came back almost twelve hours to the minute after yesterday's outage. Four-fifteem a.m. and every clock started beeping and the radio started blaring, I think I'd only been asleep for a little over an hour in the 30°C night.

There was a diesel generator thumping away all night at the end of the street powering some important part of the railway at Oakleigh station. A couple of minutes after the power came on and we'd reset the alarm clock and tried to go back to sleep, the fire brigade all came charging down the street with lights ablaze and sirens on! I think someone may have forgotton to unplug the generator when the mains came back on.

Needless to say, Wednesday the 17th is a very slow, quiet day as I try to make it through the working hours in my new stuffy, airless office.

Revisited... 2007-Jan-20

We bumped into a contractor on Saturday morning, locking up the gates onto the tracks as he was clearing up. Seems that the mysterious brick windowless building at the end of the platform contains a compressor and some 1960s era electrical equipment which is all part of the rail-signalling system. The power outage on Tuesay damaged it and they had to run a spare compressor all night to keep the points working — not a generator as I'd thought. When the power came back it ran for almost a day, but then it blew up and caused a blackout. Of course there are no parts available for a roomful of 1968 electrical equipment, but he'd repaired it and it should keep running until the next time it breaks down!

Six p.m. and all is strangely quiet — very, very quiet. The power failed at about four thirty and we thought it was just the building, or maybe the campus... then a cow-orker heard from his kids that there was no power at Oakleigh, then from others that the effects were more widespread. A forty degree day, all the air-conditioners in Melbourne thundering away and then bushfires damaged the main interstate transmission lines and it all went dark.

Left work at half-past five and slid past the traffic jam in Clayton road, literally sliding in the melted tar, all sticky and slippery. Every second motorist in the jam was illegally on the phone to their loved ones. Then half-way up North road my lack of hubris bit me on the bum as I ran over a nail and had it go blunt-end-first through my back tire. Changing a tube in 40°C heat at the side of a busy road is no fun.

Home at six and it is silent, 40°C outside, 30°C inside. All the clocks are off, all the whirrs and whines and motors are silent.