Powerless: the invisible foundations of modern life

As I write this, the electricity supply to my home is switched off.

Every few seconds, the house alarm lets out an apologetic beep. The electrician is outside, upgrading the communications module on my smart meter and installing an EV charging point. To do that, the house has to be without power for about 45 minutes.

It shouldn’t make much difference. But I feel strangely trapped.

I can’t head to a café because the electrician still needs access to the house. I can’t even take the dog for a walk in case I’m needed at home. So I stay put, waiting for the power to come back.

Disconnected

It’s surprising how quickly a home office stops being an office.

I work from home most of the time, and I’ve invested a fair amount of effort into making that work well. Reliable broadband. A solid UniFi network. A NAS. Multiple screens. Everything quietly doing its job in the background. Until someone turns the electricity off.

The Wi-Fi disappears. My NAS is unreachable. Home Assistant stops assisting. Even making a cup of coffee is off the table.

My laptop still has plenty of charge, and I can tether to my phone over 5G if I need to access the Internet. I haven’t lost the ability to work. I’ve lost the environment that makes it effortless.

Without really noticing, my mindset changes. Can I complete this task? Should I join this Teams call now or wait? And, because my mind works as it does, it’s just really hard to focus.

For just 45 minutes, my focus shifts from getting work done to managing the interruption.

Invisible foundations

The electrician isn’t here because anything has gone wrong. Quite the opposite. He’s making the house more connected. A smarter smart meter. An EV charger in preparation for when my new car arrives. More technology woven into everyday life. To get there, though, everything has to stop for a while.

It makes me wonder how much of modern life depends on things we rarely think about. Electricity is the obvious one, but it’s only part of the picture. Broadband. Mobile networks. DNS. Cloud services. The infrastructure that quietly fades into the background because it simply works.

Until it doesn’t.

Normal service resumes

Forty-five minutes without electricity isn’t a hardship. It’s barely an inconvenience.

Eventually the power comes back. The Wi-Fi reconnects. Teams signs me back in. The day carries on as though nothing had happened, and I can finally make some lunch.

The feeling of being trapped disappears almost as quickly as it arrived.

By tomorrow, I’ll have forgotten all about it.