When Eskom hands you lemons...

Originally posted in 2008--Edited today

I happened upon a thought provoking article on the web today, in a place I didn't expect to find it.

Tessa Silberbauer, writing for IOLjobs, had this to say:

"The other evening, while sitting and looking at the puddle of candlelight in front of a mirror, I had to laugh at myself.

"For all my belief in saving resources and environmental awareness, I've still been spoiled by "progress": I've forgotten so much.

"How to word-count longhand work, for example (I had to re-write this article by hand to conserve battery power, after writing the original on my PC just before a power cut). And I've become so used to having light when I want it, that I've forgotten how little I really need.

"I'm not alone in responding to power cuts, with anger sometimes. I know that there are serious losses, and that these are hurting us all. But there are also advantages to take, when we focus on our abilities rather than what we can't control.

"We can choose whether to be part of the solution, or part of the problem. Most of the time, it will be a mixed effect; but there is no excuse for refusing to do what we can, just because our contribution is small. " (see the rest of Tessa's excellent article here: http://www.ioljobs.co.za/article_view.php?fArticleId=4237298)

Being part of the solution does not mean that our contributions must be gargantuan. A grain of sand is minute, but enough of them make up a beach. And while your contribution may be only the size of a grain of sand...remembering to shut off your geyser during peak times, for example...if every household in South Africa did just that one thing, our power problem would be diminished significantly.

A painless way to be part of the solution is the change your attitude. Instead of revelling in the "kick 'em while they're down" mob-mentality of blaming Eskom and demanding pointless action (like sacking the managers, which is monumentally stupid and counterproductive), we can channel our energy into a positive, productive course of action. Tell our friends that moaning makes things worse, not better, because Eskom and the government already know there is a problem, so it's time for us all to look to solutions.

Yesterday I had a conversation with my husband's auntie, who is a bank manager in Natal. Her bank gets power cuts at about 2 in the afternoon, and sometimes her town also gets a second power cut in the evening. Now you may not realize it, but even after banks close their doors at 3, work continues inside the bank...work that ordinarily requires electricity. Auntie is very service oriented, and it bothers her that her customers, who have only a short window of opportunity to use the bank anyway, are losing an hour (and sometimes more) of opportunity to use her services. Her solution has been to install UPSs and soon her bank will be open, even during power outages. She is turning this into a marketing opportunity by posting discreet signs in her bank and at the ATMs (and is considering taking out ads in her local newspaper) advertising this fact. Not only will her customers remain loyal, but she expects her ability to remain open and functioning during the outages may draw new customers to her bank. The lady has a firm grip on the concept of taking the lemons of the power crisis and turning them into the sweet lemonade of opportunity.

Another friend of mine reports that they have dug out the old board games and play Monopoly and Scrabble and cards in the evening when the power is down. Where they used to go to separate rooms to watch TV and play video games, the family is now coming together and interacting. More lemonade.

Silberbauer's comment about being spoiled is well-taken. Since when can we not live for two hours without electricity? So, you are expected to adapt a little, change how you do things, make some plans and organize your time and activities around a short loss of power...so what? How selfish can we be, expecting our personal situations to be the hub of the universe? Can we not look for the good that can come out of adversity? Can we not take advantage of the downtime to replenish, relax, reconnect? Have we forgotten that electricity is our servant and not our master?

Being mad at Eskom only hurts you by feeding a negativity of spirit...it doesn't hurt Eskom or change the situation, it only changes you...and for the worse. Scheming to punish Eskom by lawsuits or demanding a management change or, worse, attacking Eskom employees, accomplishes nothing positive. Money awarded through lawsuits takes money away from projects designed to alleviate the crisis and, ultimately, comes out of YOUR pocket and the pockets of people like you, because Eskom's profits go to your government...and its losses come from your government, which you support with your taxes. It is never wise to change horses in midstream, and a new management team for Eskom will inevitably cause delays downstream...where the work of alleviating the power shortage is being done. And what good does it do to pinion an Eskom employee and demand answers from him or even assault him for the power issues? Better to look in a mirror and ask, "what have I done to contribute to this problem and what am I doing to help resolve it?" because you will get more answers there than from the poor guy who comes to read your meter and knows no more about what his bosses are doing than you do.

So, the government, through refusing to give Eskom the go-ahead to start building power stations years back, has handed you a basket of lemons. I'd be interested in knowing what you have done to make lemonade out of them.

Violence and invisibility

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that the entire continent of Africa…with the possible exception of oil-rich regions that invite exploitation by first world nations…is completely invisible to the rest of the world.

Yesterday I read, on the CNN website, about violence in Italy: seems there’s some flap going on regarding garbage collection and eleven people got hurt…nobody killed. But not a word about the 25,000 people displaced in South Africa.

Perusing the Reuters site I saw its roll of top stories listed an article about a soccer riot in Belgium that involved 200 people…but no deaths. But not even an honourable mention for the 50+ people who have died violently in South Africa over the last week.

The AP fared only a little better, publishing stories on May 23 and 24, but not considering them sufficiently newsworthy to be listed as top stories. So, if you weren’t already aware that something was amiss in the Rainbow Nation, AP’s website would tell you about earthquake aftershocks in China, cyclone aid efforts in Myanmar, and tornadoes in the Midwest, but the violence in South Africa would never have been brought to your attention.

Yahoo at least headlined the story: South Africa immigrant violence leaves 25,000 displaced, but the link was disappointing, since it led to a story about fighting between the government and rebels in Sri Lanka resulting in 20 deaths. So, even though Yahoo headlined the story, you couldn’t have found out anything about us or what is going on here, since the headline was linked to the wrong story and Yahoo does not provide an easy-to-access means of notifying them of such errors.

To be fair, the AP did have a couple of stories about our tribulations, but you would have to know something was amiss here and do a search on the site to find the articles.“At least 42 people have been killed and more than 25,000 foreigners displaced since attacks began earlier this month by South Africans who blame immigrants for crime and unemployment. More than 500 arrests have been made,” the article says. Maybe it isn’t newsworthy to clarify that the violence has been directed at immigrants from Malawi and Somalia and Zimbabwe? Or that the drug trade the fuels much of the crime here, at least in Cape Town, and is dominated by Nigerians against whom the police seem to be powerless and of whom the local blacks are terrified?

“Cape Town police spokesman Billy Jones said about 400 people had sought shelter on a motor racetrack after 12 people were injured in overnight attacks on an informal settlement in Cape Town,” the AP article goes on to say. I live just down the road from that racetrack…Killarney…and my maid lives across the road from the informal settlement in question. I know at least something of what is going on…for example, I know that so far, no white people have been reported as victims, not even white foreigners like myself. But does the article give this piece of information, a critical bit of knowledge in a country still suffering the lingering taint of apartheid and its attendant racism? No, it fails to specify that the victims of this violence are other poor people of colour, immigrants whom the hard-pressed locals perceive as competition for scarce resources or even predators against them. This omission can easily mislead people into thinking that the violence is indiscriminate, that visitors from other countries are endangered, that local non-black residents are fleeing in fear of their lives, and nothing could be further from the truth.

But I suppose it doesn’t matter, after all. We are invisible to the rest of the world, written off as second rate citizens of third world countries, fifty of our deaths of less value or newsworthiness than eleven Italians bruised in a spat over picking up the trash.

AP article: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SOUTH_AFRICA_IMMIGRANT_ATTACKS?SITE=NCKIN&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Karma, swift and sure

Hubby and I like to go to house sales. Not the sales of actual houses, mind you, but sales of the contents of houses. These are rather like an American yard sale or garage sale, but with a peculiarly South African twist: they are conducted with the white South African’s paranoia about crime taken into account.

Unlike American sales, there is no array of goods spread out on tables and tarps spread out in the driveway and lawn to tempt passers-by to stop, browse, and spend. Here, the signs posted do not give an address or even arrows one can follow to the sale. You have to subscribe (free) to the company that manages these sales and then, each Thursday, you receive an email listing all the sales they are hosting over the weekend, an inventory of the goods at each sale (and photos on the website), and the address (and directions to) the sale.

Once you arrive at a sale, you find a queue of people waiting for the sale to open. The organizers are scrupulous about allowing no previews and refusing to open the sale until the stroke of the clock. Once the door is opened, the manager of the sale will step out and give his little introductory speech for the benefit of first-timers: if you like something, take the tag off it, and if you change your mind, please put the tag back so others may have a chance to buy the item. That's it.

I suppose there could be an expectation that you enter the premises in the same order as you are queued outside the door, but it would be wrong. We’ve been to several of these things now, and once the doors are opened the crowd surges forward to fill the available space. At the first sale we queued outside a garden gate, and when the gate was opened, people rushed through, spreading out to climb the broad porch stairs in ranks four persons wide. When we had to narrow it down to file through the front door, people who had been far back in the queue were through the doors before those at the front. Arriving early at a sale only gets you a chance at being first through the door, but no guarantees.

We arrived at Saturday’s sale about half an hour early, which put us about twelfth in a queue that eventually grew to a crowd of about thirty people. Considering that it was being held at a relatively new flat in a pricey complex, the venue was suffocatingly small. Not only were the exterior passageways narrow, the flat, once we were admitted, was shockingly tiny. Had the bed not been removed from the bedroom, there would not have been room for more than two people at a time in the room. We were there for a pair of Elna machines…a sewing machine and an overlocker…but seeing the crowd outside, we were pretty sure we weren’t going to be able to get them. Another attendee, however, did not have so realistic an expectation, it turns out.

At the pole position was a dark haired woman wearing delicate silver and blue crystal earrings, and second was hiking-booted blonde woman of middle years who seemed peculiarly bent on informing new comers as to the order of the queue. Veterans of the sales just ignored her, but others took her seriously and dutifully assumed places at what she identified as the end of the line. When the door opened, of course, pandemonium ensued and while Silver-and-Blue Crystal-Earrings made it through the door first, Bootsie didn’t make it through second. Ah, well…such is the “structure” at such events.

Bootsie did make it inside before I did, but as she stopped to ask the sale manager the location of the sewing machines, I stepped around her and headed down a dark, claustrophobically narrow hallway towards the bedroom. Before I achieved my destination, however, I was roughly jostled aside by none other than Bootsie herself, who burst into the room like an avenging Valkyrie and stormed across the tiny patch of open space and frantically searched the two machines for their tags. As I expected, someone else had made it to the machines before I did, so I turned and began to thread my way back up that horrid little hallway, only to be bashed aside by Bootsie yet again as she crashed her way back towards the main rooms. As I finally emerged from the hall…being a congenitally polite person, I excused myself and apologized to each person going the opposite direction with whose body I was forced to make relatively intimate contact as we squeezed past one another…I heard an altercation going on in the kitchen. A brief glance revealed Bootsie verbally assaulting a slightly-built coloured woman, Bootsie screaming something to the effect “I sat out there for and hour-and-a-half! I was first in the queue!” and the other woman muttering responses I couldn’t quite make out. I hunted up Hubby, who was out on a balcony that looked to be bigger than the flat itself, and indicated I was ready to leave. The machines were gone, the flat was entirely too crowded, and the “good stuff” had obviously been retained by the owners…there was nothing more of interest in the dingy, suffocating little box.

As we made out way out the door, Bootsie was continuing her tirade at the unfortunate woman in the kitchen. It turns out her invective was directed at the person who had collected the tickets on the sewing machine and overlocker. Because the lady with the tags had been further back in the outside queue, Bootsie seemed to be convinced that the woman was unfairly in possession of the tags for those items, and was intent on browbeating her into surrendering them! She was apparently labouring under the misconception that being early in the queue bought her some kind of privilege, perhaps that she had first (or, in her case, second) pick of items for sale.
Hubby and I exited the sale and headed towards the lift. From behind we could hear the voice of the sale manager entering the fray and next thing we knew, Bootsie and her husband were hurrying onto the lift with us. She put her face in her hands and literally wept at what she perceived to be the unfairness of the queue-jumping being allowed to retain the tags…to which I felt compelled to comment “I’ve been to several of these things and my experience is that your position in the queue means nothing once the doors open.” She looked at me incredulously, then put her face back in her hands, hurrying off the lift without a single word.

Naturally, Bootsie’s conduct was the topic of conversation once Hubby and I got into our car. I had thought her officiousness at informing all the newcomers as to their place in the queue to be a bit odd, but I have learned over my years here that many of the white folk in this country are uncommonly bossy and imperious, even to complete strangers. (Example: instead of telling you that you should try something (advisory), they will tell you that you must do something (imperative)…and not in that Sex in the City “oh, darling, you simply must try this divine citronella daiquiri” way, but in a manner that is clearly commanding.) Once the whole scene had played out, it was clear that her bossy directives…and her announcements of her own place in the queue…were for the express purpose of securing an early enough entry to get to those machines. How she planned to circumvent Silver-and-Blue-Crystal-Earrings was not clear, but by the time she got into the wrangle in the kitchen, Bootsie had clearly forgotten that she was second in the queue, not first.

Her rudeness at shoving people aside, moi included, surprised me. Although the sales tend to be a bit of a free-for-all, the previous ones I attended had been at least moderately civilized affairs, people saying “excuse me,” and treating each other politely when the desired items had already been taken. This was my first encounter of someone developing a sense of entitlement and then, when thwarted, throwing a public tantrum. I was embarrassed for the woman, even if she didn’t have the good manners to be embarrassed for herself.

Considering my experience with the conduct of buyers at other sales, I would have to say her conduct was nothing short of outrageous. First, there was her presumptuousness at trying to control the buyers as they arrived to wait for the doors to open. Then, her incredible rudeness in literally, physically, shoving people aside in order to get past them. Next, her unbelievable chutzpah at accosting the tag-holder and demanding that she relinquish the tags, based on nothing more than their relative places in the crowd outside the door before the doors were opened. And finally, there was her public weeping and obvious sense of feeling ill-used because she didn’t get her own way.

Somewhere along the line she failed to take note of the fact that she was not the person in control of the sale. She could invent any rules she wanted, of course, but none of us were obliged to abide by them, only by the rules established by the managers of the sales. And when they opened the doors and gave us the spiel, there was no mention of keeping our original places in the queue and proceeding in an orderly fashion.

And that was as it should be. The purpose of these sales is to sell the goods and each potential buyer, whether he arrived first or last, needs to have a feeling that he has a chance at getting the good stuff. If you arrive last in a queue of fifty people and you know that you will therefore be the fiftieth person admitted through the door, will you stay for the sale? Likely not. But if you know that when the doors open, there will be a crush and some confusion, that you might be able to work your way into being the fifth or tenth in the door, then you feel you have some chance at getting the items you want. Why would the managers of the sale want to discourage potential buyers by guaranteeing only the very first people in the queue had a chance as getting their hands on the choice bits of merchandise? What a brilliant formula for ensuring very short queues and poor sales!

We are very much hoping that Bootsie was so disappointed at this sale that she doesn’t return. We heard the sale manager speak to her and just seconds later she was hurrying to the lift, so we suspect that she was invited to leave. Hopefully, she was invited to not attend any more sales. Should this kind of skirmish become commonplace, you can be sure that buyers will think twice about attending: the beauty of the sales is that once a tag is in your hand, the item is yours.
Hubby was as appalled at her behaviour as I was, but with typical Indian aplomb he simply wrote it off to swift karma. Her attempts to advantage herself at the expense of others was immediately rewarded by her failure to secure the goods she desired. But something tells me that, rather than take a lesson about acceptable conduct from her experience, she will enshrine the event as one more example the “ills” of the new South Africa.

Of houses and homes...

South African houses are strange.

I’m not talking about my previous entry describing such things as no built-in heat or a complete ignorance of window screens, despite this being a land of abundant bugs, here. No, I am talking about the way the houses are built.

Hubby is thinking about building and, in going over the idea with me, he has asked if I would be willing to work with the architect to build an “American-style” home. He doesn’t mean a New England clapboard or Pacific Northwest timber frame, either…he’s referring to the kind of layout that most Americans, living in tract homes, take for granted.

For example, have you ever been in a house that, when you entered from the front door you were in the dining room? Well, if you’ve ever been to South Africa, your answer will be “Yes!” I cannot think of a single American home I’ve ever been in that was laid out in such a way. And sculleries…I thought sculleries were the exclusive province of romance novels until I moved to Cape Town! And garages…what house in America, built after 1960, requires you to walk through rain or snow or blustery storm in order to bring the groceries in from the car?

A few years ago we were avidly visiting Sunday open houses (called a “show house” here) in search of a new, larger home. A couple of months later we were back on the show house circuit, looking for our rental property. In that time we visited dozens of houses and got a look at the bizarre building practices employed by South African home builders.

First of all, I am astonished at how many houses have built-in barrooms! We visited an interesting house that had dining room in what looked like was previously the foyer…when you entered the house you practically fell over a dining chair! To the left of this dining area was a galley kitchen so small that once the microwave oven was placed on the counter top and a dish drainer next to the sink, the counter space was gone. Through the dining room we came upon a tiny lounge (South African for “living room”) that managed to squeeze a sofa, TV, and free standing steel fireplace together, leaving a narrow space for walking through to the next room, a huge bar room. This room was two steps down from the lounge, twice the size of the lounge, and was dominated by a built-in bar backed by mirrored shelves full of liquor bottles. Sliding glass doors lead out into a patio and pool, and a rather shabbily kept garden with a cabana area with its own bar! I was astonished!

The person from whom we bought the rental property had a bar and her new house actually has a separate bar room built behind the garage and connected to the house by a glass breezeway. A beautiful provincial-styled house we visited also had the entry through the dining room (the lounge was upstairs!) and a fully stocked bar complete with ice machine and professional bar accoutrements.

When we bought the rental property, we removed the bar and brought it to our house. Today it sits in the garage, turned backwards so we have easy access to the shelves beneath, which are used for storage. The top is handy for putting bags on as I unload the car after shopping. Our liquor collection is behind the closed doors of our punched tin pie safe, only revealed when we have guests or when one of us infrequently wants something stronger than Coke Light or a glass of wine. I’ve never in my life seen so many houses with rooms dedicated to housing a domestic equivalent of the corner pub!

Garages are another story. In my present house, my garage opens out onto a covered patio, from which there is a quick right turn into the kitchen. My last house here saw me walk several feet in open air from the garage door to a covered porch, and from there I had to walk through the living room and halfway up the hallway to get to the kitchen door. This became somewhat of an ordeal, slogging two or three trips laden with heavy bags while the wind lashed ran onto the porch, soaking me and the bags as well. Unfortunately, most of the houses we have seen here do not have easy access from garage to kitchen. One house we saw recently would require you to climb a steep set of stairs out the back of the garage (assuming there was enough room to get around the car while laden with bags of groceries), out into an uncovered, unpaved space (grass), and then enter the house through sliding glass doors. From there, you’d have to walk through the middle of the family room and then the dining room, in order to reach the kitchen. Another house we saw just a few weeks ago, has had some extensive remodelling recently done, and the appearance from the outside was stunning, Unfortunately, in order to get from the garage to the kitchen without getting wet in a rainstorm, you would carry your bags through the side garage door which opens into the master suite dressing room! From there, through the bedroom, down the hallway past the other two bedrooms, then a right turn into the kitchen.

Most American tract homes are designed with the garage having a door that open directly into the kitchen. My house in Northern California had it, the house my father and stepmother bought in 1962 had it, as did the homes of most of my friends. It seems so simple that you don’t even miss it until you find yourself dodging slanting sheets of rain and having to make multiple trips through the weather to bring in the weekly shopping!

South African houses often have sculleries. What is a scullery? Well, it’s difficult to explain because each South African household seems to have a different definition. The most common definition is a room where you wash the dishes, separate from the kitchen. Seems rather pointless to me…but it gets better (or worse, depending on how you view it). In America, most modern houses have the laundry area in the garage, near the hot water heater (called a “geyser”…pronounced geezer with a hard “g”). In South African houses, if you are lucky enough to be plumbed for a washing machine, it will be in your kitchen (front loader). Space for a dryer? Not bloody likely. And dryers sold in South Africa tend to vent hot humid air into the room as they have no vent pipes to the outdoors. I’ve gotten around that by buying a costly Bosch dryer that condenses the moisture taken out of the clothes and deposits it into a water tank that is emptied periodically…usually once per wash day. It works well, keeps the humidity and heat in the house down, but sells for approximately three times what a “normal” dryer costs.

You also are unlikely to find garbage disposals or dishwashers in South African kitchens, and in some kitchens you won’t even find a refrigerator or a sink! Why? Because they are out in the scullery! When he was looking for his first house here in SA, Hubby would email me photos of houses he saw and liked. He was particularly taken with a house that had dark wood and green malachite counter tops in the kitchen. I have to admit, the effect was stunning. But as I peered at the pictures of the kitchen I began asking questions…where is the fridge? Where is the kitchen sink? What is all that huge empty space in the middle of the room used for? Why is there no counter space next to the stove? He didn’t seem to think this was much of a problem until I suggested that he imagine himself making a cup of coffee and a sandwich in that kitchen…how much hiking around from point A to point B would be required? American kitchens tend to have a more efficient layout, requiring fewer than four steps from the sink, stove, refrigerator, which are set out in a triangular pattern. A centre island may be used, something I have seen only once in South Africa.

The scullery idea has some merit, but more like a pantry-cum-mud porch than in its present incarnation. When I see a house with a scullery, about the only thing I can count on being there is the sink. Some houses have a dishwasher or washing machine in the scullery, some have the refrigerator, and others have extra cupboards, like a pantry. Almost all of them have a door to the outside, which is convenient for carrying laundry out to the wash lines. But for the most part, the scullery seems not only superfluous to me, it seems to be inefficient. I don’t like them at all, despite their apparently being a big selling point around here.

Electric stoves are the norm here, despite the energy crisis we are currently experiencing, and I find it surprising that more people have not converted to gas. Now, gas mains do not run in the streets here like they do in America, but I have two 19-litre gas bottles installed outdoors, connected via copper piping to my kitchen stove, and in three years of living here, I’ve used two bottles of gas. Not such a bad deal…and they are amazingly cheaper than the electricity I would be using for the same cooking! But while gas stoves…very nice commercial-type ones, at that…are readily available here, builders continue to install electric stoves with ovens so small you are challenged to roast a large chicken, never mind a Christmas turkey!

It amazes me that South Africans think nothing of having their dining rooms just inside the front door. I have seen dozens of homes with this set up, and it always seems to be just so wrong! I have never cared much for open plan design, and this particular twist on the concept I find particularly offensive. I like my kitchen behind closed doors so that when my guests sit down to table, they aren’t forced to view the mess of dirty pots and pans that went into the creation of their feast.

I also do not like the concept of having to walk through one room in order to reach another. In that house with the extraordinary bar room, one had to walk through the dining room and the living room in order to reach the bar. If you were sitting there swilling beer, every time nature called you’d have to pass in front of the TV in the lounge and dodge the chairs in the dining room just to get to the hallway that leads to the loo. The traffic simply does not “flow” in so many of these houses…the rooms feel like afterthoughts, tacked on in the cheapest, most expeditious manner possible.

So, if Hubby decides we shall build, it appears I will be tasked with educating the architect in the subtleties and pragmatics of American home design. It will have thermostatically controlled ducted heat/air conditioning in zoned areas that can be cut off from each other…why heat or air condition the guest room if no one is visiting?

We’ll have a huge geyser…solar heated, of course…so we never run out of hot water. The windows will be double-paned, energy efficient, and will open in such a fashion that window screens can be used to keep insects out. The doors to the outside will be screened as well…no more mosquitoes!

The garage will be attached to the house in such a way that I can step directly from the garage into the scullery. Yes, there will be a scullery, but unlike the traditional South African one, mine will be more of a utility room, housing the washer and dryer, a space for ironing and a hanging rack for the clothes. There will be pantry cupboards, a laundry sink, and space for an upright freezer, as well as a cupboard for brooms, mops, and the vacuum cleaner. There will also be a storage room adjacent to the garage, one with a workbench, good lighting, rack shelving, and places to store such things as the lawn mower, garden tools, ice chests, and various other bits and pieces of suburban life that simply have no place in most houses.

The kitchen will be laid out with the “golden triangle” of the sink, stove and fridge, and my stove will be gas. The breakfast bar here gets good use, and I like the no-stain, easy to clean black granite counter tops, so that will be repeated in the new kitchen. I’ll get another Franke 3-bowl sink, but this time it will be hooked up to a garbage disposal and a lovely dishwasher will be tucked in under the counter right next to it. I love my wrought iron pot rack, so the new kitchen will definitely have one, and I’m sold on ceramic tile floors in the kitchen and baths. The rest of the house, however, will have French Oak floors, like my present bedroom.

The main bedroom will have a huge bath with a big American-style walk-in shower. A Jacuzzi for two, and double sinks, and the heated towel rail Hubby has grown so fond of on winter mornings complete the bathroom “must haves.”. A walk-in closet and dressing room are a must, and each of the two guest bedrooms will have their own small baths.

With a proper foyer and hallways connecting the various rooms, rather than walking through one room to get to another, the house will be All American in design…at least inside. I’m wondering how a New England Colonial might look here, though…

FAQs re: Sweet Violet

I often get questions, most of them in person, but occasionally on a blog or forum or even in email. The same questions seem to get asked repeatedly, so I thought I’d publish some of them here. If you have questions that aren’t answered here, feel free to leave a comment and ask. No guarantees that I’ll answer it, but if you don’t ask, you have a 100% probability of never knowing the answer!

“Goeiemôre, tannie!” or, “What do you mean, you don’t speak Afrikaans?”
I am short, round, blonde, and well past the first blush of youth. When I enter an establishment like a dress shop or restaurant, I will inevitably be greeted with “Goeiemôre, tannie!” often followed by some other incomprehensible remark or query.

At first I was a bit disconcerted. Afrikaans is a guttural language like German and can sound harsh to the unaccustomed ear. Could they tell I was an accursed American and they were cursing at me? Were they making a crack about the red dot on my forehead? English is widely spoken here, why aren’t they speaking it to me?

Well, it seems that my short, square stature coupled with my age and colouring fools most people into thinking I am an Afrikaner and they are actually greeting me in the politest of Afrikaans terms! “Tannie” (pronounced “tunny”) means “auntie,” and it is a term of respect for women of generations above your own. And “Goeiemôre” (hooya mora) simply means “good morning.”

Interestingly, among the local black people (Xhosa…pronounced “koh-szah”), that term of polite respect for a woman of an older generation is “Mama” or “mamee,” spoken with the slightest bob of the head. I have been called that frequently as well.

So, despite my quintessential Northern European looks, I don’t speak Afrikaans because I am an American. But I do now understand quite a bit, including why the local Afrikaners open conversations with me in Afrikaans!

Where are you from?
TV has been in South Africa since the mid-70s. There are four broadcast channels (three of them government owned and operated) and there is DSTV…satellite TV…that brings us such wonders as BBC Prime, National Geographic, History, and Discovery channels, among others. Much of our programming…at least half of it…comes from the US. I regularly watch CSI, Las Vegas, Oprah, Dr. Phil, even Days of Our Lives. Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice, Boston Legal Smallville…all are available on the small screen here, not to mention a healthy helping of American movies, both new and old (Turner’s Classic Movie Channel also plays here).

You’d think with all that American programming flooding the screens, large and small, people would peg me as an American the moment I open my mouth. I don’t have a regional accent that might throw people off…I’m from California so I sound pretty much like most of the actors on TV and in the movies. It tends to surprise me, then, when people say things like “Where are you from? Australia?” or “I can hear you are from the UK.” I forgive the ones who mistake me for Canadian as the Canadian accent is different from the American in such subtle ways that many Americans can’t tell the difference. But Australia??

So, to answer the question: I am most recently from the San Francisco Bay area (Northern California). I was born in Oregon (which is the state immediately north of California and known for its deep piney woods) and spent my school years in San Diego (Southern California). I have also lived in the Boston area and in Tucson, Arizona. My travels have taken me to at least 30 of the 50 states, perhaps more. I just tell people I’m from San Francisco because few people here seem to have heard of Silicon Valley, my home from 1974 until I moved here in late 2003.

When are you going back?
This question seems to have two meanings: 1) when are you going back for a holiday in your homeland? And 2) when are you moving back to America because what kind of moron would want to live permanently in this godforsaken country?

I am amazed at how many South Africans seem to hate their country! In America it is a really big deal when you take a job overseas and almost unheard of for an American to emigrate to another country. Despite a moron like George Bush driving the economy inexorably towards a second Great Depression, record numbers of home foreclosures, a swiftly shrinking middle class, and a rapidly widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, Americans seem to focus on finding ways to fix (or at least live with) the vagaries of the political and economic scenes.

Not so South Africans. Throwing down their toys like petulant children who can’t have their way in the sand box, white South Africans emigrate in droves…mostly to Australia or the UK…and nobody thinks it is the least bit odd. Maybe it is just my jingoistic American upbringing, but I find South Africans shockingly lacking in patriotism. When confronted with this sentiment, invariably they remark they weren’t that way before the new (read that “black majority”) government came into power. I find that rather scary, since the old (read that “white apartheid”) government was one of the most corrupt on the face of the earth.

These people, then, are surprised when I tell them I do not plan to go back to America except for the occasional family visit (and no, I haven’t done that yet). They cannot imagine leaving a place like what they fantasize America to be...they are shocked when I tell them that middle class Americans don’t routinely have maids and nannies and gardeners (middle class South Africans do), that the average American lives from payday to payday (South Africans tend to have savings) and that in America, unless you have union representation, you can lose your job tomorrow for no more reason that the boss wants you gone (it is difficult to get fired in South Africa…lots of job protection legislation). And then they don’t believe me!

Why am I not planning to move back to America? Because my husband is South African and his job is one that is helping to build the new South Africa and its infrastructure. American business will survive without the presence of one retired secretary.

Why did you move here?
The short answer is, my husband is South African. Yes, I know he was entitled to a green card upon marrying an American citizen, and because he’s a degreed engineer, he probably would not have had much trouble getting a job in Silicon Valley. But we are both people who tend to think things through and weigh our options before making a decision, so we “did the math.” The result was quite shocking.

We found that we could have a better quality of life in South Africa than in California…and his job prospects weren’t that keen outside of Silicon Valley. We discovered that we could live a more affluent lifestyle on his income alone than we could in California with both of us working. In California I owned a house in a working class neighbourhood and drove a 14-year-old mini-truck. I worked 40 hours per week, commuted 2+ hours per day, did all my own housework, laundry, and gardening.

In South Africa, we live on my husband’s income alone. We live in what the real estate agents call a “very sought-after area,” on a beautifully landscaped 1/3 acre lot with a large, gracious house on it. I have a maid twice a week (who also does laundry and irons), a gardener once a week (who spends the whole day working on the garden), and I drive a Mercedes ML…the SUV. The proceeds from the sale of my house in California was invested in rental property, among other things.

So, I moved here to have an improved quality of life and to support my husband’s desire to work at his career where he felt it would make a difference to his countrymen.

And to have a maid.

How do you like it here?
I love it here. Cape Town is remarkably like the Bay Area in climate and topography. I grow many familiar plants in my garden here, from pepper trees to blue plumbago to hibiscus to bougainvillea. The area is similar to the Bay Area in other ways…politically liberal, upwardly mobile, and affluent. Cape Town is a beach and port city, and I live close enough to the beach to get the sea smell in the morning…but far enough away not to have to endure the immediate brunt of the winter storms.

Most everyone I encounter speaks English and most of the goods and services I need are available at costs we, in America, would consider ridiculously cheap. It isn’t paradise…we have our problems here, but on balance, there is nothing I have experienced in Cape Town that would send me scurrying back to the States.

Did your family come with you?
No, my children are grown and have families, careers, and lives of their own. Perhaps when things stabilize with the US economy and the cost of international travel doesn’t bite so deeply into the pocket, they’ll make a trip across the pond to visit. But their lives are in America and I expect they will opt to remain there.

Americans tend not to emigrate, remember?

Why do you wear that dot?
Ah, the dot. From the stares and double-takes I get, one would think seeing a plump little blonde woman wearing a red dot on her forehead was unusual or something!

Seriously, though, I do get stares and double-takes from people when they see my dot. Some looks are positively hostile, some just rude (extended stares), but most just convey curiosity about something unusual. So why do I wear the dot.

The short answer? My husband is Hindu and the red dot signifies, in the Hindu culture that I am married (Snopes.com notwithstanding). He wears a wedding ring out of respect for my culture, and I wear the red dot in public out of respect to his. Yes, I also have a wedding ring, a beautiful wide gold band channel set with eight brilliant cut diamonds alternating with nine baguettes.

My mother-in-law favours a rather pinkish red dot with a slightly nappy surface, preferably quite small. I prefer a larger dark red dot with a circle of black around it, but there are as many styles (and colours) of dots (also known as “bindi” or “kum kum”) as there are grains of sand on a beach. Unmarried women may wear dots as a fashion accessory, but the red ones are considered to be reserved for married women.

A common question is how the dot is affixed to the forehead. Modern dots are commercially produced and are sold in packets. “Fancy dots,” dots with crystals and pearls and other decoration, generally come in small packets, perhaps no more than six dots to a packet. Plain dots can be found in packets containing 50 or more. They all have one thing in common: they are stuck onto a card with a tacky adhesive. You peel the dot off the card and stick it to your forehead. Particularly costly (or favourite) dots may be used over and over again with the application of a dab of surgical or eyelash glue. My favourite dots come in packets of 45 and cost about $1.25 a packet; my mother-in-law’s dots cost half that.

So, there you have it...the questions I most often field here in South Africa. Is there something you might want to know? Leave a comment with your question and I'll get back to you!

Look in the mirror before you point the finger of blame

If I hear or see one more South African moan about the ineptitude of the police in this country, I may have to fetch them a serious klop.

A few months ago a company in Cape Town hired a pair of twin brothers to work in their aluminium blind manufacturing business. The owner was a nice, compassionate sort of fellow and when the brothers were in financial need, he advanced them some money against their future wages. Shortly thereafter, one of the brothers…I’ll call him David…stole some tools and other items and was thereafter fired. What his boss failed to do, however, was report the incident to the police.

Another employer, only a few blocks away and in the same business, hired David without checking his employment references. A kind-hearted man, when he discovered that David and his brother, Tom, were homeless, he offered to help them get a small, inexpensive place to live. He paid the first month’s rent and the security deposit for a little furnished flat nearby on the promise that he would be paid back out of David’s future wages. David and Tom moved into their little flat on a Sunday afternoon.

Monday, David failed to show up for work and he didn’t call in. After a few more days of absence, David’s boss became uneasy and actually called David’s former employer. It was then that he discovered that David had been fired for theft.

Three weeks passed and on a Friday morning, the owner of the furnished flat received a call from Tom. After extending his apologies, he explained that he and his brother must leave immediately for Johannesburg due to an emergency concerning their mother, and they would not be staying in the flat any longer. What, he asked, did he have to do to get the deposit refunded? She referred him to her husband, who drove over to the flat, only to find that the television, DVD player, and microwave oven were missing.

While her husband went to the police to lay a charge of theft against their former tenants, the landlady called David’s employer to ask if he had a way to contact David. The employer, Clifford, told her that David had not been to work since the day after he moved into the flat. He also said that he had contacted David’s former employer and learned about David having been fired for theft. He believed Tom still worked there, however, and he gave the landlady the name and telephone number of Tom’s employer.

The landlady regretfully informed Clifford that the security deposit he had paid on behalf of the brothers was now forfeit, and suggested that he might want to join her husband at the police station to lay an additional charge of theft. When he said he had no proof that he had paid the money to them, the landlady countered that she was a witness to the transaction and that they had bank records of the transaction.

“You must do this,” she insisted. “If you let them get away with this, more people will be victimized. If David’s former employer had reported his theft to the police, you would not be out this money now, and I would not be dealing with the theft of my property, either.” The man declined to “get any further involved.”

When she called Tom’s employer, the landlady was informed that Tom had not shown up for work for a week. She inquired about David, as this was the employer from whom David had stolen, and suggested that the man should lay a charge of theft against him that could be combined with the case that had been opened for the theft from her cottage. The man stated that he had no desire to become further involved, he just wanted to wash his hands of the matter and forget about it.

And so these two young men continue to deceive and victimize people with impunity because nobody wants to be bothered with reporting the crime to the police. Apprehension would have been dead simple had that first employer made a complaint to the police, for David went to work only a block away and his brother remained employed at the same place. It would have been a simple matter for the police to watch Tom and be lead directly to David …if only the employer had reported David’s theft to the police.

Because he could not be bothered, because that employer took no action, now Clifford…who has a family to feed, is out R5500 (in buying power, the equivalent of 55 bags of groceries). And the landlord and his wife, who make just enough money off the rental to pay the monthly bond (mortgage), must now replace a 24” TV, a DVD player, and a stainless steel microwave oven.

But the public won’t know that at least two of the victims of these brothers refused to contact the police, thereby leaving them free to victimize others. The public will simply assume that the mini-crime wave (who really believes that their crimes began with the first employer and ended with the unfortunate landlord?) is the result of the ineptitude of the police in catching them. When they are eventually caught and a list of their crimes is published, the public will see it as proof that the police are bunglers and can’t even catch a petty thief when he takes a job only a block away from the scene of one of his crimes.

So, the next time I meet up with a South African who moans about the ineptitude of his police force, I’m going to have to ask him if he has ever been victimized and, if so, did he make a report to the police. Does he know of people who have been victimized and failed to report it? And when he tries to justify his or his friend’s lack of action by saying “It wouldn’t do any good, they don’t do anything,” I will be forced to inform him that he is the reason the police don’t apprehend the criminals before they amass an impressive list of victims. He, and people like him who fail to report crimes and thereby allow criminals to move on to another and another and yet another victim, keeps the police blinded and unaware and actively prevent them from getting these people off the street.

So, the next time you are tempted to blame your police force for being soft on crime, take a look in the mirror and ask yourself if you are doing your part to keep your community crime free. Being too lazy to report a crime cripples your police force and helps the criminals. Are you part of the solution, like this landlord, or part of the problem, like those two employers?

The Eggs and I

The Eggs and I

I am becoming rather annoyed with the eggs around here.

Yes, this is a “spoiled American” rant, as my husband calls it. But the truth is, I am accustomed to certain things about my eggs that are not part of South African eggs and, after four years, some of these things are starting to annoy me.

I don’t mind that you can’t find a white egg to save your soul. Since I no longer have little kids who want to dye Easter eggs, it’s no big deal to me if the shells are white or brown. But it would be nice if the egg shells, regardless of colour, were of a relatively uniform thickness.

What do I mean? Well, anyone who has ever bought and cooked eggs in America has an unconscious expectation that, when cracking eggs, the same amount of force is needed for each and every egg. Americans have this expectation because…well…that is their reality. I doubt it occurs to any American that egg shells come in varying degrees of thickness because in America, they don’t! I have no idea how they do it, but every carton of supermarket eggs that you open will have shells of uniform thickness…the same amount of force you used to crack the first egg will be the same amount of force you need to crack the sixth.

Why is this an issue? Well, in a typical breakfast I make between two and six eggs. I used to crack my eggs right over the pan, but no more. If the egg is thin-shelled, a sharp crack on the edge of the pan will result in shards of shell scattering into the pan like shrapnel. If the egg is thick-shelled, I will have to pound the egg on the edge of the pan numerous times…again, fragging the pan with bits of shell. Thin-shelled eggs burst open unexpectedly, leaving egg on the fingers and shredding the yolk, thick-shelled eggs require digging one’s nails into the barely visible crack and prying the egg open…again leaving egg all over the fingers and often resulting in broken yolks. It’s a good thing that Hubby and I both prefer our eggs cooked with broken, hard-cooked yolks.

Another problem is that South African eggs often have blood spots in them. Now, most Americans would be grossed out by the little quarter-inch bleb of blood floating around in their egg white and would discard the egg. If South Africans did that, there would be a lot of eggs go to waste since I see that spot in fully half the eggs I smash open here. Again, breaking the egg into a bowl allows me to fish out not only the shell shrapnel, but to remove those blood spots, which look like a scab if they are allowed to cook. Again, fingernails are the best tool for this, so again, goopy egg-fingers.

Boiling eggs here has been a no-win situation for me. First of all, no matter what I try, I cannot get the yolks centred. Why is this an issue? Well, have you ever tried to make devilled eggs with the yolk cavity only half there? What about dishes in which the eggs are supposed to be sliced or quartered for garnish? I know all the tricks…I’ve been cooking for half a century now…but South African eggs seem to defy all the rules. No matter what I do, the boiled eggs come out with the yolk almost clinging to the inside of the shell. Last night’s batch was the worst yet…the yolks had migrated to one end of the egg and when I peeled them, the white was so thin over the end that it peeled away with the shell leaving exposed yolk in its wake. I have no idea how South African cooks get their boiled egg yolks centred…or if they even do.

I come to the opinion that the egg industry here doesn’t apply the same…or even similar…product standards that are the norm in the US. For one thing, I’d never seen a rotten egg (off the farm, anyway) in America. Here, I’ve managed to stink up my kitchen with two of them in the past four years. Admittedly, they both came from the same supermarket chain (Checkers) which will never, ever, ever see me buy anything fresh from them again, but the fact remains that I bought a carton of eggs from a major supermarket here and two of them were stinky, sloppy, liquidy, disgustingly rotten. Since I am afflicted with one of those open plan kitchens, the stench quickly filled not only the kitchen, but the dining room too, and enveloped the breakfast bar between them, where my husband was making coffee and awaiting his eggs. Unfortunately, the second bad egg was opened a few days later, repeating the experience. I now stick to Windmill eggs from Pick n Pay, their freshness never having disappointed me.

Americans are also accustomed to having clean eggs. You know…clean…no feathers or dirt or chicken poop sticking to them. Apparently that’s not a big concern here, and another reason that scattering egg shell shrapnel all over the edible part of the egg is not such a great idea. Three of the eggs in the dozen I boiled last night had dirty shells…looking actually like dirt…and one had identifiable chicken poop clinging to it (Grandma Violet used to send me out to the chicken house to collect eggs…I know what a poopy egg looks like). Gone are the days that I simply opened a carton of eggs next to the stove and cracked them into the pan as I wanted them. First it’s a wash, then into the egg basket, then a crack into the bowl followed by a smell test and then a fishing expedition to remove shell splinters and blood spots.

Making breakfast sure isn’t what it used to be!

Keeping the status quo

If you are like most people, sometime around your first birthday you learned to walk. Oh, it took you a year or more to reasonably perfect the skill, but with perseverance and the encouragement of those around you, but the time you reach the age of four, you were fairly fluent. You could get where you wanted to go, both quickly and slowly, depending on your mood and enthusiasm, you could go up and down stairs, stop, start, raise up to a standing position and sit back down, all with relative ease. Over time, you have come to think of walking as second nature, as if you were born to it, and no longer regard the skill as anything requiring your conscious attention, with the exception, of course, of walking on unaccustomed or challenging terrain.

So, what if things suddenly changed and you had to relearn walking every three to five years? And not relearn what you know now, but you had to learn new ways of accomplishing what you do now because the old ways suddenly no longer worked. Suppose, for example, that when you tried to sit in a chair, nothing happened. When you activated all the muscles and nerves you usually used to sit in a chair, you just remained standing,. Or worse, you sat on the floor instead. Suppose that some of your movements worked as normal…say, crossing your legs…but others didn’t work at all any more. And that you suddenly found yourself walking backwards when you wanted to climb the stairs.

And then you discover your next door neighbour is doing the same thing, but he doesn’t seem to be as concerned or upset as you are. “You’ve been upgraded,” he tells you over the back fence. “Some new features added, some old one deleted or their controls changed. You’ll get used to it.” And grumbling that it’s taken you three years to master this last upgrade, you walk backwards into your house (because trying to walk forward the old way doesn’t work at all any more) and click on the TV to the Help channel and being the laborious task of learning how to use the lower half of your body all over again.

This would be a pretty stupid way to live our lives, wouldn’t it? A waste of time, energy, brainpower, effort…all of which could be better spent doing other things, if only taking a leisurely Sunday afternoon nap. Just recently I lost half a day trying to figure out why I couldn’t connect to the internet. Hubby, technical whiz that he is, tracked down the problem after first discerning the problem was not Telkom, our ISP, our modem or our wireless router…his computer was humming along the internet just fine. Mine, however, was dead. At first we thought it was the wireless radio in my laptop, because I could connect to the net if I connected to the router via a phone cable. Had this been the case, it would have been a very costly fix, since my laptop is 2.5 years old and it is unlikely that parts for it exist anymore. It would likely have meant a replacement had Hubby’s wizardly brain not discovered that a bunch of my settings had been altered in such a way that my radio was no longer functioning. Effectively, it was shut off in some part of the software.

Now, nobody uses my computer but me…and I didn’t turn anything off. In fact, I make it a point to stay away from all those internet settings and such because I don’t know what they do and as the old saying goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But the settings had been changed and when Hubby discovered that fact and returned them to their previous conditions, I was back on the internet without a hitch.

So what happened? Well, as near as I can figure, one of those automatic upgrades came along and reset some stuff which was incompatible with the settings necessary to connect to my wireless lan. I usually leave my computer on overnight and some mornings I awaken to find that Microsoft has taken my computer over and forced some kind of upgrade upon it, then rebooted the machine. Other times, I find that Symantec has updated my Norton Utilities without asking my permission first (it is only supposed to be able to do that to my anti-virus definitions). Perhaps one of those updates involved resetting something? I don’t know, but I do know that nobody in this household changed them.

I don’t like upgrades, updates, and things like that. Yes, I know that could make me look like a Luddite in some circles, but c’mon, if I don’t want to make MSWord play “Oh Danny Boy” on bagpipes in the background while I type, why should I have to add that ability to my existing installation? And if I’ve memorized 500 shortcuts and keystrokes, do you really think I want to relearn half of them? Just how irritated…and unproductive…do you think I get when a key combination I’ve been using for years now doesn’t work any more or worse, does something entirely different? I’ve been using MSWord since 1986 (before PCs had mouses!!) and I probably have learned 500 keystroke combinations in that time…not that they all work the same way they used to.

This may sound petty, but think about it for a minute. What if you got into your car one morning and the turn signal stalk and the wiper stalk had been switched? Hubby deals with this every time he switches from the S2000 to the Merc, and his annoyance does not diminish with time. He will hit the indicator lever and when water sprays up onto the windscreen and the wipers deploy, he is NOT a happy man. Wouldn’t it be just jolly if one day he trod upon the brake pedal thinking it was the stiff clutch of his sports car?

I am not antiprogress, but I think change for the sake of change is just stupid. In 1975 I bought a TR-6 and I drove it until 1990, giving it up only because my hip was just not managing with that clutch anymore. In 1990 I bought a Mazda B2600i 4x4 and drove it until early 2004 when I moved to South Africa. In both cases I drove the vehicles for years without having a car loan hanging over my head and, with proper maintenance, sold them in excellent condition. In the time that I had only two cars, the average American had ten…and a never-ending debt load, since they were trading in one loan for another with each upgrade. And why? I got rid of the TR for medical reasons, and the 4x4 because it was impractical to export it…both ran well and looked good…why would I want to trade it in?

I’m kinda the same way about my houses. I bought a house in 1977 and lived there for 13 years. A divorce brought that house to sale. My next house I also lived in for 13 years and only sold it to move to South Africa. Now I’ve lived here for four years, three of them in this house…the first house was just too small for all my big American furniture (literally…we had half of it out in the garage!). It will be no surprise if I live here until I die in 20 or 30 years hence.

I’m good at keeping stuff that works. My Maytag washer and dryer set lasted me 28 years, my GE refrigerator 22. Some of my furniture is nearly 100 years old, inherited from relatives who have gone on to the Great Beyond. The stuff I purchased new…well most of it is creeping up on 20 years old, but it’s solid wood and non-trendy in design, so they’ll likely be the heirlooms of the future. Most of my appliances toddled off in the arms of new owners at garage sales because the power is different here in SA, so I can’t use them here. But my dishes are 22 years old and still grace the table as well as they did when they were new.

I believe in changing things for rational reasons. In California, the Maytags fizzled out and were not energy efficient, so I had no qualms about replacing them. They had, after all, served an entire family for more than a quarter of a century. Here, I replaced a nearly new kitchen stove…one of those ceramic top jobs…with a gas range: electricity is a very expensive way to cook your food and now, with the power failures, while everybody else is trying to boil water on a BBQ grill, I have a kerosene lamp on the counter and my burners are merrily dancing with flame.

So, today I drive an eight-year-old car. My husband’s is nearly new, but that was because his previous one was wrecked by the dealer and had to be replaced…otherwise he would be driving a car the same age as mine. I try to add things to my wardrobe that both appeal to me and will stand the test of time, things that, when past the first blush of fashion, will enter the pantheon of enduring style. I have no qualms about spending hundreds on a handbag, but only if it is the kind of bag that is not dated by its trend trappings. No blingy Guess bags for me, I’ll take timeless Ralph Lauren.

So, I’m not a big fan of change for its own sake. Fashion passes me by, trends don’t bother to stop at my doorstep. If I can’t think of a justification beyond “it’s cool!” or “I want one,” it’s not very likely to end up in my life. It’s my opinion that buying a new car every three years or moving house every three or four is just a waste of money, money that could be put to better use elsewhere. Next year my car will be paid off and, knowing that I keep cars for 14 or 15 years, Hubby is already planning what to do with the money that will be freed up. Right now he’s tossing around either the down payment on another piece of rental property or setting the money aside to finance a truly fabulous vacation.

I’ve been looking in jewellery store windows…quality jewellery can be a really good investment…

Generators, Eskom, and my wallet

Hubby is an engineering manager for Eskom and, as such, has access to information the rest of us don’t have. A few weeks back, based on some of that insider knowledge, he began to consider having a generator fitted to our house and wired into the DB board so that in the event of a power cut or failure, we could still have electricity.

We had a brief discussion over the weekend and, for a considerable variety of reasons, have decided against it, despite knowing that the load shedding may continue for as many as five or more years. Access to the funds to do so is not an issue…we have a comfortable income, investments that could be liquidated if necessary, excellent credit and a huge amount of equity in both our home and our rental property. Access to the cash to add a generator and have it professionally installed so that it would automatically start up and switch over at the drop of a KW is no problem for us.

The problem lies in our assessment of the situation. We have come to the conclusion that it is the wrong thing to do for a variety of reasons:

1) First of all, we decided that we can live without electricity for 2 to 3 hours per day. The notion that our lives will crumble and fall apart because we can’t watch Oprah or Noot vir Noot is just stupid. Yes, it will be inconvenient, but since when are we guaranteed convenience in our lives? I mean, how spoiled can I be that I resent having to light a couple of candles and read a book or play scrabble or cards with my husband?

To be honest, it just wasn’t that hard to arrange my maid’s work around the outages. Since, if we are going to have an outage, it usually occurs between noon and 2:30, I’ve restructured her work schedule so that, during that period of time, she is doing things that don’t require electricity, like sweeping, mopping, dusting, washing windows, changing beds, etc. She can vacuum and do the wash as soon as she gets here, and when the power returns at 2:30, she can do the ironing and any other chores requiring electricity.

Why can’t my own work be arranged that way? The blackouts are a good time to do tasks that don’t require electricity, whether it is cleaning out cupboards, clearing out the garage or wendy house, sorting and filing papers, or hauling stuff. Sitting down and thinking of ways to be productive without electricity for a paltry two hours a day may not exactly be easy, but who among us was promised that life would be easy?

My own father was raised in a household without electricity or running water or telephones…and he’s still alive and kicking (and fully electrified). All of our ancestors until about a hundred years or so ago, lived their entire lives without the stuff. How can we be such whingers over losing its benefits for a trifling two hours every couple of days?

2) Purchasing a generator is quite a financial commitment…I’d rather spend the money elsewhere. The cost/benefit just doesn’t move me to parting with thousands of rand: how much is a couple of hours of electricity a couple of times a week worth to me, anyway? Not that much!

3) One thing nobody has thought of is the pollution problem. If you run a diesel or petrol generator, you are going to create both noise and air pollution. Having that diesel generator clattering along at the back of your garage would be very much like having a large diesel truck sitting there, idling for a couple hours and pumping a mass of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere. Imagine if all of your neighbours also had the equivalent of a diesel truck idling in their gardens all at the same time…

4) Then there is the matter of fuel. First, you have the logistics of keeping your generator fuelled: you’ve got to get fuel containers, then you have to fill them…which is not going to be cheap. Then you have to transport them safely. Then you have to have a safe place to store them…how close to your bedroom or lounge or children’s playroom do you want a fuel dump? And, of course, there is the matter of filling the beast and then going out again for more fuel.

Second, if we all decide to run out and buy generators for our homes…even if that many generators are available at prices we can pay…we will put huge pressure on fuel availability. And what happens when a commodity is in short supply? The cost increases.

Did someone say “biofuels”? Well, if we are dealing in futures here, eventually Eskom is going to get this sorted out and we won’t have the load shedding anymore. Biofuels come with their own set of problems, including lack of immediate availability. And, frankly, in a country where poverty-induced hunger is still a significant social issue, I have serious moral qualms about removing food sources from the reach of the poor just so I can surf the net while my neighbour’s house is dark. Only if I can be absolutely guaranteed that turning corn into fuel won’t make the price of corn rise or reduce the availability of cheap mielies for poor people, will I consider biofuels a viable solution. It is more important for poor people to eat than for middle class people to have light.

5) One of the things we are not considering is that this is a short term problem. Do I want to spend thousands of rand to purchase an alternative power source for my house when, in just a few years, it won’t be needed? Ok, if my power was down 4 hours every day, I might consider it, depending on what time of the day the outages were occurring. Or, if this is what electric service was going to be from this day forward…then it might make sense to have the alternative power. But two hours just a few times a month? Sound like a huge waste of money to me.

6) Which brings me to our final reason for rejecting the idea of installing a generator: cost effectiveness. It ain’t.

Diesel generators costs thousands of rand. Installing it so it will power at least a few of your mains plugs isn’t free, and setting it up to automatically switch over isn’t free either. Then you have to count the cost of fuel and maintenance of the generator (just like the engine of a diesel bakkie, it’s going to need maintenance from time to time). Add this all up and divide it by the number of hours you think you are going to need it this year. If you get hit with load shedding twice a week, that’s about 5 hours a week or 260 hours per year. Assuming you can do all your own electrical installation without frying yourself or your house wiring, what is it going to cost you?

Well, a generator big enough to supply a small household can run you R10 000, assuming you are not buying a name brand like Honda or Cummins. One that I investigated has a 12.5 litre fuel tank and will run about 12 hours on a tank of fuel. So, assuming best case scenario, i.e., no maintenance required on the generator, no increase in petrol/diesel prices, you average two outages a week and the power crisis is solved in 5 years, allowing you to retire the generator, how much is that 2.5 hours per day going to cost you via generator? Just under R22, or about R44 per week. Now, let’s assume the criteria remains constant, but the power crisis is resolved in 2 year: just over R50 per day, or R100 per week. If fuel prices rise, so will this operating cost. If the number of load shedding incidents drop to less than an average of two per week, the average operating cost will also rise. And, if you had to hire someone to do the installation, that cost will be higher still. Bottom line…are you prepared to fork out R400 a month for 20 hours of electricity? What do you think you will be doing with that electricity that it is worth R400 over and above your current expenses? Washing a load of clothes? Surfing the net? Watching TV?

For me, it seems a lot of cost and not a lot of benefit. The outages don’t happen that often, and when they do happen, they don’t last that long. I can live without a couple of hours of electricity…I could do it every day, if I had to, without much difficulty. Oh, I’d have to give some thought to things I could do by natural sunlight or candlelight, but I like to think and solve puzzles, so it’s no biggie.

When I consider that my father grew up in a house with no electricity, that he was able to finish high school (including homework), that he ate nutritious meals and didn’t suffer from food poisoning, even though they didn’t have refrigeration, it tells me that being deprived of my power two hours each day is a very tiny sacrifice for the benefit of my adopted homeland.

What can you do when your electricity goes out?

Eskom, yet again

I received a very nice comment on my last blog entry:

We decided to start a website aimed at constructively addressing the problem, getting people involved and seeking solutions and alternatives...

Feel free to visit http://www.shedhappens.co.za/ . The site has only been running for a week now, but we honestly believe that it has a lot of potential to become a valuable nationwide tool in solving this problem.

Pointing fingers at this stage will not help us. We must look at sustainable long term solutions.

I am chuffed that I am not the only person who recognizing that whingeing and finger-pointing is not the solution to the power shortages here, and particularly encouraged that someone has actually started a website dedicated to solutions to the problem rather than just pissing and moaning about it.

I encourage you to visit the site, join up, read the comments and forums, and make your own contributions. We really are not entirely helpless in this situation and by helping ourselves and each other, we can help take some of the pressure off Eskom and thereby allow them to commit their resources to fixing the problem rather than defending themselves against continual attack.

When we all pull in the same direction, we get there faster.

Eskom, again

Ok, I don’t know about everybody else, but I’m getting tired of the whinging and shit-stirring.

This evening Hubby and I watched 3rd Degree and, due to the host’s continual interrupting and badgering, were unable to get much coherent information out of the guest from Eskom. My patience at an end, I fired off the following email to the program.

First of all, I was appalled at Debra Patta’s rudeness to Steve Lennon on tonight’s program. She repeatedly interrupted him and was sharp and offensive in both her manner and her words. Frankly, I was a great deal more interested in what he had to say than in her grandstanding.

Secondly, the primary source of this problem is the government’s refusal to allow Eskom to build new plants when it warned of the impending power crisis as much as 10 years ago. I don’t blame the waiter when the cook burns the bacon...why blame Eskom for not building additional power plants when they were refused both the permission and the funds to do so?

Isn’t it about time that the media, including programs like 3rd Degree, stopped fanning the flames of discontent and started focusing on the fix? Eskom put an additional 1000MW on the grid last year and will have another 1000MW up within the next year or so. Negative reporting like Debra Patta’s inquisition actually HURTS recovery because it makes people want to quit working for Eskom (employees are being accosted and abused by the citizenry in public!) and discourages others from wanting to work for the company.

Why not stop beating the dead horse of fault finding and try to find a way to help Eskom fix the problem? Fostering an adversarial situation between Eskom and its consumers may sell newspapers and draw viewers, but it does absolutely nothing to help resolve the problem of the energy shortage. It is self-serving, mean spirited, and short sighted.

No reply so far, but if I ever get one, I’ll post it here.

More madness: Eskom's woes

Last night Hubby and I had dinner with a friend who works for the Ministry of Trade and Industry. She, like many of us, is concerned about the power outages. I gleaned some very interesting insights from their conversation.

Eskom has made the news again with the announcement that it has reduced its headcount by half in the last twelve years and now it is suffering from a critical skills shortage which is negatively impacting its ability to resolve the present power shortfall. The citizenry, predictably, is outraged, ignorant of (or ignoring) the pragmatic reasons for such a situation having come to pass. The government, hypocritically, is calling Eskom on the carpet, tasking the company with resolving the problem that is, in truth, one of government’s own making.

Eskom has known for years that this power crisis was looming. Over the past decade or so, Eskom has quietly recommissioned mothballed power plants, converting its excess generating capacity over to active use to serve increasing power demands country-wide. But, due to short-sightedness on the part of government (by refusing to authorize the funds to build new plants), Eskom was unable to build new power plants to replace the excess capacity and over time, Eskom came to have no reserves of any significance.

According to President Mbeki, Eskom repeatedly asked for authorization of the funds to build new power plants and they were refused because the plans were for building “excess capacity.” This is immensely short-sighted because an electric power plant isn’t like a litre of milk…you can’t just run down to the store to get another one when you run out of power. The gas-fired plants in Atlantis and Mossel Bay are quick to build…18 months or so…but they cost THIRTY TIMES what a conventional plant costs to run! They cannot be run at a profit unless the rates you and I pay for electricity go up. WAY up.

So, Eskom found itself on the horns of a dilemma: government won’t turn loose of funds to build new power plants, the company is expected to generate a profit along with its electricity, and there are a lot of employees…in particular, the guys ordinarily involved in the planning, designing, and building of new power plants…who have nothing to do. Eskom can’t raise its rates, can’t build new power plants…so what does it do? Well, it cuts the unnecessary staff, of course. What else could it do?

When a company is mandated to be profitable but is prevented from raising its rates to accommodate inflation or salary increases to its employees or the increase in the costs of goods and services it must use, what steps can it take to fulfil its mandate? Obviously, if it cannot increase its rates, it has only two possible paths: increase sales or reduce overhead…or both. Eskom has done both…and now the whole of South Africa is paying for it.

With the country’s annual growth rate presently at 4%, Eskom has increased its sales, because a growth in the economy requires additional electricity to support it: it sold more electricity, so it made more money. To sustain that rate of growth, however, Eskom needs to add 1600MW to the grid annually. Until recently, it has done so by bringing its mothballed excess capacity power plants…the “back ups”… back on line…but what happens when we run out of back up plants just sitting out there on the veld, waiting for their turn to go onto the grid? We get power shortages.

Eskom has reduced its overhead as well, but a corporation’s ability to do that is limited. Eskom doesn’t have warehouses full of electricity they can divest themselves of, they can’t sell their assets. The easiest and most cost-effective way to trim the budget and reduce overhead is to reduce personnel and reduce salaries, increases, and benefits to the personnel who remain. This, of course, has a knock on effect of the remaining personnel being dissatisfied with their reduced circumstances and sends them off looking for new jobs, further reducing the overhead. In America we call this “downsizing,” and Eskom has downsized its human overhead by 50% in the last twelve years. So, while the demand on its product has been growing, Eskom has been shrinking…but it has managed to meet its mandate from its sole shareholder, government, to be profitable.

Well, now it has come back to bite us in the butt. The excess capacity is used up and because government specifically refused to allow Eskom to build excess capacity to replace that which was converted to active service, we have no back up, no reserve generating capacity. Now that government has recognized its error and reversed itself, tasking Eskom with building 20 new power plants over the next 20 years, Eskom no longer has the trained personnel…or even, in some cases, the training programs…to effect a rapid remedy of the situation.

Worst of all, due to alarmist media stories, people are angry with Eskom for a situation not of its making. Even government, the actual perpetrator of this fiasco, is holding Eskom’s feet to the fire…talk about blaming the victim! Essentially government is saying “Yeah, we refused to give you the money to avert this disaster, but that is your fault because you didn’t make us listen.”

So, today Eskom is chasing a moving target. Eskom needs to add 1600MW annually to the grid in order to sustain a growth rate of 4%. Government is pushing for a target growth rate of 6% growth, which will require Eskom to add 2400MW to the grid annually, just to keep up with growth, never mind putting in excess capacity. It takes about eight years to build a conventional power plant, with the cost in the BILLIONS; it takes longer and costs more to build nukes, presently the only viable solution for the Cape and other places that don’t have immediate access to coal beds.

The gas-fired plants in Atlantis and Mossel Bay are just fingers in the dike. They added 1000MW to the grid last year (but we needed 1600), and they took 18 months to build. Eskom is hard at work building more gas-fired generating capacity in these locations, but at the end of the build they will have added 2000MW to the grid and a 4% growth rate will have required 4800 in the same time frame. Eskom is chasing a moving target and while they can catch up, it’s going to get worse here for a while before it gets better.

Don’t be surprised if Eskom begins reporting operating at a loss over the next few years. But don’t take it as further proof of management incompetence, take it as proof that Eskom will sacrifice whatever necessary…including profits…to keep your lights on at a reasonable price. You see, the only short-term solution to the power shortage is to build those gas-fired plants. Nothing else can go from bare dirt to fully operational in such a short time. But the cost to operate these plants is 30x higher than a conventional plant because they burn diesel fuel. Under normal circumstances these plants would only operate two or three hours per day, during peak demand times, and remain idle the rest of the time. Due to the government’s refusal to allow Eskom to replace the excess generating capacity that was pressed into service to support the country’s growth, these expensive peak time generators are running up to 20 hours a day to supply much needed capacity to the grid. When put into service only a few hours a day, their high cost of operation is not an important factor. But running flat out for extended periods of time is going to have a significant deleterious effect on Eskom’s bottom line…it is likely to eat up all of the company’s profits and then some. Eskom can prevent those losses by raising its rates, but I don’t think the customers would like that as much as the company failing to post profits for a while. Remember, Eskom’s sole shareholder is government, so a rate increase that could restore Eskom to profitability…well those profits go into the government’s pocket, just as an operating loss comes out of it.

I hope not to hear any more cries about replacing Eskom’s management. The fault is much less with management than with an owner…government…that will not allow those managers to do what is necessary to keep the lights on. Cries to replace the management are just stupid…is there anyone here in South Africa who knows more about running a parastatal power utility than the guys who are doing it now? How does replacement = improvement?

Here’s hoping that we put on our thinking caps before we open our mouths. Eskom really is running as fast as it can, building new power plants and looking at new technologies to implement once the crisis is over. Tell the next anti-nuke nutjob who harangues you that we, in the Cape, are right now faced with three choices: noisy diesel generators running 20 hours a day and pumping pollutants into the atmosphere, clean, quiet nukes, or no power for half or more of each day (and that power to come from the existing nuke).

Once the Koeberg reactor that is presently down for refuelling comes back on the grid, the present crunch should be eased a bit. But make no mistake, Eskom is behind the curve now, thanks to government’s failure to heed timely warnings, and it is going to get worse before it gets better. It WILL get better, but it’s gonna take some time.

Eskom, South Africa's Prince of Darkness

Eskom is the supplier of electrical power to South Africa (and a few other places). Eskom, in fact, is one of the largest electricity generating companies in the world. Like in America, Eskom is owned by its shareholders; unlike America, Eskom has only one shareholder…the government. This makes it a “parastatal” company, one that is not technically owned by the government, but is, in fact, controlled by it.

Due to poor planning…mostly on the part of government…and unexpected population shifts, South Africa is presently experiencing a lot of planned power disruptions. Having lived through the summer of rolling blackouts in California, this is nothing new to me, and I know how to arrange my life around the power outages. Unfortunately, Eskom’s manner of handling the outages is not as efficient as Pacific Gas and Electric’s was, so we are often left in the dark, both literally and figuratively.

I understand the problems Eskom is experiencing and the citizen unrest against them is, in large part, unfair. But since when are people fair? They will yell at a waiter because the food is not properly prepared (when the fault is the cook’s), they will impeach an excellent governor in favour of an arrogant ass of an actor (when the fault was with scheming corporations over which that governor had no control), and they will blame Eskom for insufficient capacity when the fault is with the government for failing to heed Eskom’s warnings and authorize the funds to build more power plants.

That said, however, Eskom must take the rap for its egregious mishandling of the situation with its customers. Good communication can work wonders with a discontented group of people. With clear and proper explanations, people can understand a situation…even if they still don’t like it and remain unhappy with it. But knowledge makes people feel empowered and feeling empowered mitigates, to some degree, their enmity

The first place Eskom falls down is in its use of jargon. I am a reasonably intelligent person, literate and fairly well-informed, and I often have difficulty understanding what Eskom is trying to say. Luckily for me, my husband is a technical manager with Eskom and I can ask him to explain it to me…most South Africans, however, do not have this advantage and therefore remain in the dark. An example of this is when we had an automated shutdown of the local nuke a few years ago and the local news had terrifying headlines about the workers at the power plant “scrambling” to shut the plant down and avoid a catastrophe. Nothing could have been further from the truth. But the Eskom spokesperson who gave the media their information had committed the Sin of Jargon and the media folks who didn’t know the jargon just morphed it into something they did know, and terrifying headlines hit the streets. What the spokesperson had said was that the reactor had SCRAMmed, SCRAM being an industry acronym for a well-controlled automatic safety procedure the reactor engages when the sensors sense anything being even slightly out of whack. Nobody scrambled, no meltdown was narrowly averted, no panic had occurred or was necessary. But because the spokesperson did not explain SCRAM to the media, “the reactor SCRAMmed” was misinterpreted as the reactor crew scrambling and their creative juices flowed from there.

Another, more timely example, is the use of the phrase “load shedding.” What does that mean to you? Personally, I get a mental image of an overburdened little donkey shaking off some of its cargo…certainly nothing even remotely related to a power outage! I assumed my ignorance was due to me being foreign, that “load shedding” was a South African term that they all understood but I didn’t. After a conversation with a local woman last week, however, it became apparent that South Africans haven’t a clue either. They just take is as a euphemism for Eskom intentionally dumping their power.

Well, in one sense they are right, but because Eskom hasn’t adequately explained (in non-industry jargon) to its customers what load shedding is and how it works, people don’t get it. They see it as arbitrary, unpredictable, and therefore not something they can plan for…which pisses them off. And because the phrase “load shedding” is an Eskom invention that originally had nothing to do with shutting down residential and other non-industrial customers, there’s nothing in the term that would allow someone to intuitively grasp its meaning, like the PG&E term “rolling blackout.” Yup…that’s what it means…”rolling blackout.”

The woman I spoke with appeared to be of at least normal intelligence, but not only did she not understand what “load shedding" meant, she had no idea why Eskom was doing it. When I explained to her that these were rolling blackouts…that the power in my suburb was cut for two hours so that other people could have the electricity, then their power would be cut so that I (and others) could have electricity, and then, after two hours, yet another suburb would lose power for two hours, she quickly grasped it. The blackout rolls from suburb to suburb…an easy mental picture for anyone to form. So why can’t Eskom explain this in simple, easy-to-understand language devoid of industry jargon?

Now I am sure Eskom is confident that their website has all the answers. In fact, they are so confident that when my power went down unexpectedly the other day (my husband works for Eskom so I can actually find out where we are on the scheduled outages), I called Eskom to see if this was a scheduled outage or if there was another reason…like a car rammed a power pole…for my electricity to be down and got a recorded message that stated that Eskom was load shedding due to shortages (duh!) and to find out when my area was scheduled for load shedding, I should check their website. Now this is monumentally stupid for at least two reasons: 1) the majority of South Africans do not have computers and/or internet access and 2) those of us who do have computers and internet access cannot get to Eskom’s website…or any other website, for that matter…during a power outage! But somehow these very simple bits of fundamental information have escaped Eskom’s notice, so customers who awaken to find their power out…with no clue why, since load shedding at 6 am doesn’t seem especially logical…have no way of knowing if theirs is a scheduled outage that will resolve with time or some fault in the system that needs to be reported.

Being married to an Eskom engineering type, I tried to do the conscientious thing yesterday morning and go to the website and download an outage schedule for my area. Unfortunately, despite my fairly decent native intelligence and high degree of literacy, I was unable to make heads or tails of the thing. My interpretation was that if I was lucky, my power would be down from noon to 2:30, if I was unlucky, it would also be down from 6am to 8:30am, and if I was in a serious state of karma-debt, it would also be down from 8pm to 10:30pm as well. What days? No clue. How do I know which of those times would see me without power? No clue either.

Eventually, Hubby deciphered the danged thing for me and it turns out that you practically have to have an engineering degree (not to mention internet access at any and all times of the day) in order to use the blasted thing. It involves three pages of hoop-jumping (most of it egregiously non-intuitive) in order to input your city, get the hokey-looking dial that points to the colour that applies to your area, and then get the interpretation of your colour status. Hint: brown is bad.

Now you have to go to yet another page to determine what that brown means, because there are three degrees of brown. Brown1 means you’ll be out once during the day, Brown2 means twice, and Brown3 means three times. (Since the outages are now 2.5 hours each, why bother turning it back on at all?). On that third page you are supposed to see a chart that tells you what days of the week and the times you will be affected by Browns 1, 2, and 3. Interestingly, Hubby’s chart showed the days (he was accessing the website from inside Eskom’s network) and mine did not (I was accessing from outside).

Now if I, a veteran of California’s Summer of Rolling Blackouts, could not decipher this load shedding schedule without help from an Eskom insider, I’m wondering just how useful it is to other people who don’t even understand the concept of a rolling blackout. What, after all, in the words “load shedding” gives any indication of what is actually going on?

Addressing Eskom’s means of communicating the schedule for the blackouts, they couldn’t be doing a worse job. Aside from the aforementioned lack of access to the website for most of South Africa’s millions of Eskom users, there is the matter of that complicated, obtuse method of access the information for the minority of us that can get on line. PG&E had a simple and brilliant solution: on your electric bill there was a code number. That code corresponded to blackout schedule that was printed on the back of the bill. Simple…read your code, compare it to the chart, know when your power was going down.

In South Africa some of us have “prepaid” electricity, meters in our houses that we charge with a card purchased at any one of thousands of gas stations, 7-11 stores, and grocery stores. These people don’t get a monthly electric bill, but they do have to physically go to a shop to charge their cards, so a brochure with a colour-coded map could be handed out with each electricity pre-payment.

I don’t really blame Eskom for the inadequacy of the supply. They started warning government more than ten years ago that new power plants were necessary…they even had the plans ready for many of them…but government didn’t listen. I think it is supremely ironic that government today is haranguing Eskom and calling them on the carpet to explain the meagre supply when, in fact, government’s foot-dragging is at the core of the problem. The President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, has recently admitted as much. Eskom knew they needed new power plants, but government would not loosen the purse strings and now we are in a deficit situation…and with 2010 (World Cup) just around the corner.

Let’s just hope our electrician is as good to us as he has been in the past…Hubby has him coming out to give us an estimate for installing a generator to power the house during shut downs. Considering who Hubby works for, that’s pretty ironic in itself!

Great Expectations

Years ago I was a recruiter…a “headhunter,” if you will…and one of the things that struck me repeatedly were the unrealistic expectations of entirely too many of the employers with whom I dealt.

“I don’t want some old fart,” they would tell me. “I have a young team here…mostly under 30…and I need someone who will fit in.” And then they would proceed to give me a litany of qualifications that would take the better part of a lifetime to acquire, followed by a salary range that would cause a fresh grad to laugh. Part of my job, of course, was to counsel these guys…to give them some reality therapy. One of my stock-in-trade lines was “You’re going to either come up on the money or flex on the qualifications because guys who can do all this won’t work for that kind of money.”

Occasionally, however, I would run across some starry-eyed navel-gazer who would insist that if I just tried hard enough, I could meet his needs. To these people I found myself saying “Let me get this clear…your basic requirements are a guy under 30 with 20 years experience who is willing to work for entry-level wages. Honey, I’m a recruiter, not a magician!”

Those headhunter days are long behind me, but I still find myself regularly coming up against people whose expectations are all out of proportion to reality. I own a bit of rental property and my premium flat is about to come vacant again, and I am just flabbergasted at what some of these potential renters are expecting for the money they are willing to pay!

First, you must understand that houses and flats (apartments) in Cape Town, especially newer ones, tend to be rather on the small side. This, of course, is not uncommon anywhere in the world where the area is considered desirable: builders tend to want to maximize their profit by squeezing as many units onto a piece of dirt as they can, no matter that the rooms in the units are so small that it’s a challenge to get furniture into them.

Three years ago my husband and I spent three months looking for a new home, something that had a master bedroom big enough for our king-sized bed and the other pieces of our bedroom suite. We ended up buying in an older suburb where the rooms (and plots) were more spacious than the upmarket area in which we had been living. Shortly after moving into our new house, we went out looking for an investment property. We looked at houses, flats, and a variety of different units before settling on the property we now own.

We learned quite a bit over the last three years. One of the things I learned from a rental agent is that the average size of a two-bedroom flat here is about 74 msq…800 sq ft. Such a flat would typically have four rooms…living room, kitchen, bedrooms…plus a single, shared bath. I’ve seen even smaller but for the most part I would agree that 800 sq ft is a pretty typical size for a two bedroom flat around here.

In California I owned a tract house built in the early ’60s and it was about 1325 sq ft, which included three bedrooms, two baths, eat-in kitchen, living room, and a family room. Yes, the bedrooms were small and the eating area in the kitchen was cramped, but it was a single family detached house. Our flat, the one coming up for rent in a month, is 120 metres square, which is roughly 1300 square feet…nearly the size of my California house! And into that space it has a living room, dining room, huge kitchen, only two bedrooms, and two baths…unheard of in a flat! Additionally, the flat has two patios, a fenced-in private yard, and access to the pool and entertainment area. And to top it all off, the flat is located in a quiet residential area with well-maintained owner-occupied homes surrounding it, and all of the utilities are paid…no electric bill, no water bill, no bill for the trash collection.

The rent is R4750 (or $672) per month and considering that the tenant will not have to pay utilities…easily R350 per month, the price is quite reasonable. It’s clean, spacious, well located, and reasonably priced…so why are we having trouble finding a tenant?

Well, the first tendency is to look at the property and say “What’s wrong with it?” but after a couple of weeks of advertising, a couple of patterns began to emerge. The first one was one of callers not being serious.

We try to be conscientious, thoughtful landlords. As a result, we like to give the present resident at least 24 hours notice before dragging a bunch of strangers through her home. Unfortunately, the people who make these appointments seem to have no compunction about not showing up…and not bothering to even call to cancel.

This can get to be very annoying…I have to drive over to the place and wait for them to show up and so I sit in my car, in the hot African sun, awaiting the arrival of rude bits of humanity who cannot be bothered to call and cancel their appointments. Monday I had arranged to show the flat to four people…I have learned to arrange a single showing per day to cut down on the number of times I have to drive over and sit around waiting for no-shows…and out of the four, only one turned up. And she was a rental agent who had her client in tow.

It happened again last night…in fact, I would say that easily more than half of the appointments or just shrugged off by the potential renter…people who made the appointment but were not serious about keeping it. In fact, one woman has failed to show up for her appointment three times, each time sending me a hand-wringing email with one excuse or another and begging me for an “urgent” viewing. I go to the trouble to make arrangements with the tenant and then she no-shows again…makes me wonder what kind of excuses I would be dealing with when her rent is past due over and over again.

The second pattern I’ve begun to see is crystal ball gazing. This is South Africa and most houses have a six-foot high masonry wall surrounding the front of the property. This is the norm here and South Africans are accustomed to it. So, a rental agent made the mistake of giving out the address of the property to a potential tenant who, instead of waiting for his appointment to see the place, drove by it, looked at the wall, and then called her up to say the place wasn’t what he wanted. Without even seeing it? This same agent gave the address to another client who did the same thing, then called and said she was not interested in an “ugly little green house.” What? It’s painted white, not green, and besides, you cannot see it because of the privacy wall around it!

Yet another woman rejected the place…sight unseen, mind you…because her boyfriend didn’t want to live in that area. Ok, that’s fair enough…except that when she gave me a list of the places he did want to live, guess what was on his list? Yup…the very area he had just rejected!

The third pattern I have found…and the one that irks me the most…in the one I call “Great Expectations.” Like the woman who called and asked where the flat was located and when I told her, she very archly informed me that she was only interested in places near the beach…the flat is about a kilometre away from the beach, so I immediately checked various rental websites, fearing that I might be asking an out-of-line price for the place. Fifteen minutes searching for two-bedroom, two-bath flats near my local beach turned up several places on offer, not one less than R12 000 (about $1700), and none with the utilities included in the rent. None of them were garden flats, either, which generally rent for more money as well. I had to wonder what she had been smoking before picking up that phone, because my search revealed to me that tiny (less than half the size of the flat I was offering) flats near the beach were being offered for around R6 000 to R8 000 per month, again without utilities being included in the rent.

Then there was the young lady who made an appointment and who showed up with her boyfriend and another couple. She called me back a few days later and declined the flat because it was “too small.” It seems the two couples wanted to take it together and the couldn’t make 1300 square feet work for them…geeze, what do they want? A mansion? My neighbours in California raised entire families…households full of kids…in houses barely larger than this flat! And they can’t do two couples in it?

Then there was the woman who wanted to negotiate the rent if she also rented the little cottage on the grounds when it came vacant in April. What kind of break would I give her? The same break the bank will give me on my monthly mortgage payment, I was tempted to tell her. What cheek! Here I’m offering her a flat that is more than 50% larger than the average two bedroom flat (and not at a 50% increase in monthly rental), and throwing in free utilities, and she wants a better deal? What is wrong with this picture?

The tenant who is moving out was no better. Just weeks after she moved in…and knowing that the flat had secure parking for two cars but no garages…she called my husband and quite seriously tried to talk him into demolishing half her garden and one of her patios and building a garage for her! And she was serious! She had a small dog (we allow small pets) and left the front door open so the animal could come in and out, keeping her security door latched. No problem…except that the constantly open door was an invitation for the entry of a mouse into her flat. It took up residence in her kitchen and she demanded that we get rid of it for her.

Then there was the matter of her lights…she insisted that the downlighters in her living room were faulty, so we sent our electrician (at a cost of R300…more than $40) to chase down and resolve the problem. Turns out she needed to change the light bulbs and she was just astonished when Hubby informed her that it was her job to change her light bulbs, not ours!

And her dogs (by the end of her rental period, there were two)…the lease specifically states that dogs must be kept in the tenant’s private garden, but any time I was there, they were running loose in the common area and she was not very conscientious about picking up after them. When counselled on the problem, we were treated to a litany of reasons why she “couldn’t” comply, clearly implying that we should take responsibility and improve the fencing that separated her garden from the common area so her dogs would stop digging out!

On top of all of this, she was regularly a week…and sometimes up to two weeks…late with her rent, a situation that caused us to have to pay the mortgage on the rental property out of our own pockets and replenishing the funds when she got around to paying her rent. This caused us some uncomfortable cash flow problems at times, since we had our own obligations to meet and sometimes found it difficult to do so until she got around to paying her rent.

I suppose it is not surprising then that after two years of this kind of thing, it didn’t break our hearts when she informed us that she wasn’t going to renew her lease. In fact, we had already decided to decline to renew it at the end of her term…but she saved us the awkwardness of telling her.

And now I’m having to deal with people who can’t seem to read plain English (they send me email asking where the flat is located and how much the rent is, both of which are clearly stated in the ads), people who seem to think they can see through concrete walls, people who can’t be bothered to keep an appointment and haven’t the common courtesy to call and cancel it, and people who seem insulted that my R4750 flat…with free utilities, nogal…isn’t a seaside mansion. It’s getting to the point that I am seriously re-thinking the rental business…not that owning rental property is such a bad thing, but it would certainly be a lot better if I didn’t have to deal with all these people!