Three days of rationing under a typhoon

Nothing broke down.

I’m starting there because it’s the opposite of what I usually write when I talk about electricity. The month before, in Chiang Mai, a power strip had died with a sharp crack and a smell of hot plastic that lingers in a room for two days. This time, nothing. No smell, no blown fuse, no warm casing.

Every piece of gear I own worked perfectly, and that’s exactly what made the situation absurd. I had six devices in working order and nothing left to fill them with.

What happened

The typhoon had been announced days ahead. I’m not going to give you weather figures, I didn’t record any and I’m not going to copy someone else’s numbers to sound credible.

What I actually saw amounts to little. The corner store had one aisle empty and one aisle full, and I couldn’t tell which of the two was the signal. The metal shutters along the street came down that afternoon, one after another, with a noise I can still hear. Around seven in the evening, the power went out in the building, and it came back seventy hours later.

I was never in danger, I never went without anything essential, and this article contains no survival story. I spent it in a room doing division.

The evening inventory

First reaction: turn on every screen to figure out where I stood. Second reaction, a second later: realize that’s exactly what not to do.

I checked the levels once, and wrote them on the paper notebook. Not out of nostalgia. Because keeping a list on a phone means turning the phone back on to reread it.

The laptop was at three-quarters. The phone a bit above forty percent, which was my own fault and not the typhoon’s. The headphones showed something around half. The old projector tablet, twelve percent, which took it out of the running immediately.

The clip-on Bluetooth speaker doesn’t have a gauge. It has a voice that announces, one day, that the battery is low, and before that day you know nothing. This is my third unit of that model, and I’m only now discovering that I’ve never known how much charge it had left.

Add up those percentages and it looks comfortable. Split them up and it stops being comfortable, because a percent point doesn’t travel from one device to another.

The exception, found on day two

One device can fill another. The laptop charges the phone through the connector the two share, and it holds by far the biggest reserve in the room.

I only learned this on the second day. I’ve had the machine since February, I use it every day, and it took a power outage to make me look at the most expensive object in my bag as a tank.

That transfer costs something. The laptop wakes up, the screen lights up for a second, and some energy is lost along the way. How much, I have no idea. I don’t have an instrument, and I’m not going to invent an efficiency number just to sound precise.

What I can say is that the device I used the least over three days did the most work.

The signal existed and was useless

Mobile data never fully disappeared. It was there, showing bars. Between mid-afternoon and the middle of the night, it carried nothing usable. Around four in the morning, everything went through.

I’m not explaining this, just reporting it over three days on one phone in one neighborhood. That doesn’t make it data.

The material cost, though, hit hard. My phone drained faster than a normal day while doing far less. I spent an hour and a half the first evening waiting for messages to send, screen on, watching a wheel spin. It’s the dumbest expense of the three days, and I made it with full awareness of what I was doing.

The order that emerged

By the second day, I had a ranking. It doesn’t look like anything I would have written cold.

• The phone. Not because it does the most things, but because it’s the only one that receives anything from outside.
• The laptop. A tank. Opened twice in three days, and never to work.
• The wired earbuds. Zero percent consumed, and that’s their only virtue in this story.
• The headphones. Their noise cancellation is a comfort feature, and comfort was the first thing cut.
• The speaker. It gives nothing that another device doesn’t already give. Stayed off.
• The projector tablet. Twelve percent, a projector, a blank wall, and no reason at all.

This ranking follows neither the price of the objects nor the place they normally hold in my day. It follows a single question: what does this device give back, relative to what it costs, over the next three hours.

It’s a kind of triage nobody prepares for, myself included, even though this is literally my job.

What would have helped

Not an object. That’s the least appealing conclusion possible, and it’s the one I’ve got.

What would have helped is knowing my own numbers. How many hours my phone holds standby on a weak signal, I didn’t know before and only know approximately now. That my laptop could power everything else, I discovered six months too late. That my speaker has no gauge at all, I learned at a point when the information had become useless.

The power bank I wrote about last spring, I still haven’t bought, and these three days aren’t pushing me to decide in a rush. They simply gave me the question I’ll ask before buying one, and that question isn’t about capacity.

These questions stay open, and what I refuse to conclude from a single episode is written in what I refuse.

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The power came back a little before midnight, on the third day. The air conditioner beeped three times, the hallway light turned on, and I didn’t feel anything in particular, because all my devices had been off for hours and nobody was there to celebrate anything.

I got up, plugged in the laptop, and looked at the queue: one accessible wall outlet in the room, five devices to fill, and an order to decide on all over again in the same week. I picked up the notebook and started a list I finished writing two weeks later, in Seoul.