Oh Eskom, you were doing so well. After 9 days of South Africa being free from the saddening darkness that is loadshedding, the official Eskom Twitter account ruined the beginning of many people’s weekend in 140 characters or less.
#PowerAlert. Stage 1 #load_shedding will be implemented from 08:30 to 22:00 today.
Please find energy efficient ways to keep warm.
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) July 10, 2015
The length of the stage 1 loadshedding is all the way from 08:30 to 22:00, so if you’re particularly unluckily you may be in the dark for the entire day.
An earlier Tweet also announces that the chance of your power going out will get higher as the day goes on.
The load shedding prognosis is medium for the morning and very high for the evening.
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) July 9, 2015
On an equally cynical note, we have a personal bugbear with Eskom that has nothing to do with their “job” of supplying electricity. If you’ve read any statements by the company, you may notice that they have no idea what the correct format of the word “loadshedding” is. They sometimes write it, as we do, as a single word, but other times it’s two seperate words, then it’s a hyphenated word, and on Twitter it is a hashtag with an underscore.
Perhaps a new company slogan should be:
“Eskom; our use of language is as as unpredictable as our services.”