Before you jump to conclusions, no I’m not about to join the ranks of everyone else in talking about these local and european elections. (Well I am, but that’s in my other blog.)

No, here, I’m going to talk about an occurrence that happened on voting day. one that riled me, one that affected me more than any local politician (yes, even when they look for my vote).

What happened me was a power outage.

Now this is the first power cut that I’d experienced whilst having a smartphone, having only had mine for about a year or so. And having it made this power outage a very different experience.

It was in the morning when I woke up that it happened. Daylight reigned so i had no need for candles and my phone was on full charge so really, I wasn’t overly affected.

Side note – Yes I charge my phone overnight energy freaks, wanna fight about it?

The first thing I checked was that it wasn’t an apocolypse. Naturally. I worry about these things. DON’T JUDGE ME, the house was empty. So I surveyed twitter to see the extent of the damage, only a ten mile-ish radius without power.

“Phew,” I thought. “I haven’t been left behind.”

And so my day went on. There was no sound, save for the rickety creak of the house in the wind, and the impatient ticking and clocking of the numerous clocks in the house. They didn’t sync, and that added a sense of panic for me – having grown accustomed to power, and being reduced to this – writing about my experiences (or lack of them) out of boredom!

My skin was covered in goosebumps, and I couldn’t light the fire, for fear of blowing the boiler. I couldn’t put on the toaster for obvious reasons. I had to eat my Ready-Brek cold! The ESB had turned me into a famine victim! Oh evil of evils!

When my brother who lives next door came to visit an hour later i had grown thoroughly stir crazy, sending out messages in bottles on twitter to save me.

There was no radio. There was no TV. there was just ourselves, talking.

I thought social skills were something I was adept in at this stage having been through Bebo, Facebook Twitter and even for a brief moment in time MySpace. (although I wouldn’t go telling people about that, it’s thoroughly embarrassing.) Google had even tricked me into joining their revolution, which, failed.

But alas, i was fooled by the endless slogans and positive messages about ‘connecting with people’ and whatever other things I do not care to recite or remember right now. It was a blow to my confidence. A jab below the ribs discovering that I couldn’t keep a conversation going for more than a minute at a time.

Has the 21st century made social interaction obsolete? Yes, until theres a power outage!

I was midway though replaying final fantasy X on my trusty old ps2 at this stage, and without power I was suffering from withdrawal symptoms. My brother, as i previously mentioned, had come up to the house to chat, well to ask me to babysit his 2 and a half year old son while he and my sister in law had a run. So I accepted.

Now I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but on reflection, something i did that evening summed up the whole situation. My total lack of skills with children were never so apparent as when I pulled out my smartphone and put on Peppa pig for my young nephew during a power outage.

Even in a power cut, I was reliant on electricity. But electric appliances such as my smartphone didn’t, at least not as much. That is scary.

BING – the power came back on. And so we all leave that problem behind us until it hits us again.