Electricity - The Final Showdown
The house had been rewired.
The tariff had been changed.
And we were still making cups of tea with a kettle on a camping stove.
Pretty much at a loss, I started asking around the village to see if anybody had any suggestions.
One of the expats said, “Oh, yeah, that’s super common, you need to request a potencia change.”
A what now?
Much digging later, and it turned out that sometimes the electric company capped the amount of KW they were sending to your house.
Why? I have no idea.
But excitingly, the next level of the game meant that we had to call the electric company back again.
Phone call 1: “Press for English.” No answer.
Phone call 2: “Press for English.” No answer.
Phone call 3: “Press for English.” Electric company: “Hola, que tal, no hablo ingles lo siento.” Electric company: *hang up*
Phone call 4: “Press for Spanish.” Me: “Hola, que tal, lo siento, mi espanol no es muy bien.” Electric company: *hang up*
Phone call 5: “Press for Spanish.” Me: “Hola, necesito más potencia.” Electric company: “Que? No entiendo.” *hang up.*
It was all starting to get a bit dejavú like...
Happily, my wonderful neighbour Loly came round and asked what I was doing. On explaining the situation to her, she called them and shouted. My Spanish wasn’t good at the time to understand most of it, but I definitely got ‘maquina de cafe...’
A few minutes later (of course she was put through straight away and speaking to somebody almost immediately) she told me that the house was limited to 3KWh of power at any one time.
I won’t bore you by getting into specifics, but basically that means that I wasn’t being provided with enough power for any of my appliances.
Anyway, Loly shouted at them, and they promised that within 24 hours they’d increase the potencia.
48 hours later, nothing.
After 3 days one of the builders, taking pity on me and obviously frustrated at the lack of progress, called the electricity company pretending to be me. (Good thing Felicity is such a gender-neutral name...)
Ah, I couldn’t change the potencia over the phone, everybody knew that! They had to email me a form for me to send back to them.
They email the form.
I fill it out.
Email it to them.
5 days later - nothing.
We call back.
We don’t get through.
We consider giving up.
We’re washing clothes in a bucket, boiling water on a camping stove to wash dishes, I’m begging people to let me shower at their apartments, and I’m starting to enjoy Nescafé instant. A week of that kinda thing is fine, but over a month? It gets old pretty quickly.
Then, one morning, while I’m out, a man turns up while Rose is home and starts wandering around the house with a clipboard. She tries to figure out what’s going on, but with her Spanish and his English it’s difficult.
Finally, he finishes his inspection and tells her we’re not allowed more potencia. (At this point she figured he was probably something to do with electric but you can never be 100% sure.)
She phones me in a panic and I beg one of the builders to hot-foot it up to the house and speak to this guy.
While Rose is pleading with him to stay, he starts showing her pictures of his art - turns out he’s an absolutely exceptional pencil artist. He tries to ask Rose if she’s got friends on the island, and the best she can manage is, “All my friends are fish.” It was a stressful day for all concerned...
While this is going on, the builder arrives at the house! Difficult as communication has been at times, the builders I’ve had really have helped me out of more than one ridiculous situation.
A heated conversation with lots of gesticulating and pointing later, and the inspector rips up the form and produces a new one - potencia increase approved!
To this day I have no idea who the guy was or who he was inspecting the house on behalf of. Or what was said to convince him to give us power.
All I cared about was that two days later, when Rose and I were playing our daily, ‘you turn on the coffee machine while I stand by the fuse box to turn the power back on’ game, IT WORKED.
We had coffee.
We had hot water.
We had potencia.
We had won Electricity Round 3.
Aaaaaand then the roof fell in.
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