The cost of sitting in the dark
All those years spent “studying” mathematics; unlike the bug beneath a looking glass, I had to try and understand the wonder before me. Oh, and wonder. Now, I apply my ability to practical situations.
For example, I am able to put a dollar value on the hours spent waiting for the electricity to be fixed. Here we go. This morning, a tanker filled with propane pulled in the lane, and the guy did whatever he does with that long hose. At the end of the job, a small printer beside his seat spits out an invoice. In this case, I purchased 160 liters of something I can’t see or hold. Smell? Apparently so. The driver confirmed that my “twin tank”installation can hold about 720 liters, more or less.
And so, on to the calculations. My bill for the product came to $136 and pennies. To me, a way to represent the last power outage of around twenty hours: $6.80/hr. Reasonable. More importantly, I can now calculate my potential for a longer outage.
You see, my last twenty hours in the dark allows me to calculate the requirement per hour. Let’s call it 8 liters/hr. With total an onsite capacity of 720 liters, we can probably tough it out for ninety hours. If I’m attentive (and I will be), following the “disaster”, I can then do what my neighbours do: fill the bathtub, cook up some food that can be eaten in the dark (and cold), learn some songs to sing, once the importance of the apocalypse has entered my head. In short, wait for the next step in a societal meltdown.
