I guess it's time to become a prepper

At 11.30 yesterday, I had just come back from a quick workout and sat down with my breakfast. One piece of bread, two eggs, coffee. Ready to work. 11.34 I noticed the green light from my laptop charger went dark. The wifi icon started blinking, searching. There must be a power cut for the whole building, since we share wifi with our neighbors downstairs. I reach for my phone to hotspot from it. I have signal, but the internet does not work. Not even Whatsapp.

Strange. Both electricity and the internet down, at the same time?

Sending and receiving texts work, sporadically. I have a client meeting at 12, and it took 15 minutes before my text to let her know I couldn't join was sent. For Tom the 3g seemed to work still, so I decide to bike over there and see what news we could gather.

The rumor mill ran hot, quickly. Some said it could be an attack because Portugal and Spain left an agreement with the US about buying fighter jets three days ago. Later it was a fire in a main hub in France, which caused them to shut down. Of course, there was the endless jokes about the Russians. Then came my personal favorite, a fake news article shared on Whatsapp, detailing 15 countries being affected in Europe, with fabricated quotes and warnings about "unusual movements in the North Atlantic" from NATO. All this less than two hours after power went out and while all established media said they were trying to identify the problem and cause. Erhm.

It turned out to be a major power cut for all of Spain and Portugal, and parts of France. And you don't really grasp how much you depend on electricity until you lose it.

"I'm half internet," I told Tom at one point, not quite knowing what to do with myself after I organised my closet, cleaned out all bathroom drawers, listened to two episodes of Decoding the Gurus, and considered how useless I would be in an actual apocalypse. In the afternoon I went for a walk to see if I could get internet somewhere, because our neighborhood was not blessed by the internet gods.

The Guardian kept me up to date. Regions in Spain reported coming back online and that made me feel calmer. By nightfall we still had no electricity, but I'm Swedish, so obviously I had stocked up on candles at IKEA months ago. Disconnected from internet I finally finished Murakami's latest, which was a slog, to be honest. Apparently it would take a complete technical shutdown for me to push through, but I guess that's the silver lining and all.

21.30 the lights came on, internet powered up, and people cheered on the streets. Ten hours disconnected, but we survived!

Now I guess it's time to become a prepper and stock up on generators, power banks, water bottles, canned goods, and an emergency hand crank radio. Also, maybe we can squeeze in a bunker into our garden?

I'll keep you posted.