Gaming, doing your job or even the simple act of making a cup of coffee has become increasingly difficult now that the Eskom loadshedding schedule is throwing South Africa into darkness. Everyone and their cats are complaining about this and when the loadshedding kicked off a few months ago, I wrote about a gamer’s guide to loadshedding with some basic tips. However, unlike Bane in the image above, we weren’t born in the darkness and molded by it.
Related: A Gamer’s Guide To Loadshedding
Those tips, however, won’t help all that much if Eskom doesn’t follow its own loadshedding schedule. It’s bad enough that we don’t have power for several hours a day thanks to loadshedding (I won’t go into the details and all the reports about why this is happening in South Africa right now), but it’s worse when Eskom doesn’t follow its own schedule.
If you head on over to Eskom’s Twitter account, you will see hundreds of comments on every post about loadshedding and several of them complain that according to their municipal schedule, the power shouldn’t be off at a specific time, but it is. This has happened to my area in the Nelson Mandela Metro 4 times since loadshedding kicked off again as well.
Doing some investigations, I found that there is definitely a cause for concern and a good chance that these reports from various users are accurate. That’s when I started to phone my local municipality and electricity centre for more information. Speaking to multiple employees on the phone, I found that sometimes, Eskom doesn’t seem to follow its own loadshedding schedule, instead, it sends the local municipality an updated schedule each day that the municipality has to follow. Below is a direct quote from an employee, which will remain anonymous for obvious reasons:
Sir, we apologize for the inconvenience caused, it is out of our control. Every morning Eskom sends us an updated loadshedding schedule for the metro. The official loadshedding schedule can sometimes be inaccurate and we’ve had a lot of people phoning because of this, so if you are working from home it is best to phone each morning and make sure with us, again, sorry but I can’t do anything to help.
For this example, you can check for yourself by looking at the loadshedding schedule for Group 6 over on the municipality website, then calling 041 506 5595 to ask when the power will be out and you should get different answers. This is horrible, to be honest, as not only do we have to deal with power outages, but we also have to deal with schedules that aren’t being followed.
Always keep in mind that it isn’t the fault of the person you are talking to over the phone as they have just as much control over the matter as you do, so stay civil, please. With that being said, gamers should take the greatest care with their equipment during these difficult times and turn off everything well in advance, as you never know if the power will go off earlier or later than expected. It is also recommended that to protect your gaming equipment, you should phone your local electricity department or municipality at least once a day for their “daily updated loadshedding schedule from Eskom”.
Have you experienced loadshedding outside of the supposed schedule? Let us know in the comment section below. Please refrain from political discussions and all that because this isn’t what this post is about.
