Huh??

This morning the power went off for the fourth time this year so, once again I phoned the Electricity Company to report it.

The message I got as a recorded message was as follows:

"Currently there are no faults in the area of Postcode 6***."

OK, fine, I live in that postal area and the impression which that message gives is that we are the only ones in the state of Western Australia who still had power. Western Australia is about five times the size of Texas so someone has really stuffed things up with that message. Anyway, I pressed button 1 and waited for a real person to come online, getting the same message every 30 seconds or so.

Eventually I got to talk to a real person who commented that there had been several calls from my street and that he would organise for a crew to investigate. Twenty minutes later we had power again.

I am still shaking my head about the recorded message. Why pick on a particular postal area unless there was a problem and, if this was so, why were we reassured that we had power when obviously we didn't or we wouldn't be phoning to complain? Weird are the ways of bureaucracy ...

And here is a word for Scrabble players:

Aeaeae: [a] Magic. As in aeaeae artes, the magic arts. The only all-vowel six-letter word know to the author. The derivation is from Aeaeae, which was the surname of the legendary pig-fancier Circe and the name of a small island off the coast of Italy, said to have been her place of abode. Useful for unscrupulous players of parlor word-games. If taken to task for using it in such circumstances, you say: "Well, yes, strickly speaking it is foreign, I suppose - at least in origin - but, surely, it's a word everyone knows, isn't?"