Fernando Salazar

Or at least some of them, namely: Me.

What you see here is my new, Microtek DoublePOWER 800VA UPS – an uninterruptible power supply.  Here in India electrical service is not consistent.  Brown-outs and outages are common. For example back when I first arrived in Pune and was recording my lease at the Registrar’s office, power went down there and for a few blocks around, at which point civic work halted and we collectively went out for tea.  Power was restored in a few hours and my lease was eventually duly recorded.

Buildings like mine have their own generators which pick up when mainline power fails.  However there is anywhere from a 10 to 30 second failover time when that happens – way more than enough to power down my wireless router, not a great thing to have happen when you are in the middle of, say, online banking.  So I got this UPS in the hopes that when these brief outages occur I can at least keep internet going for a while.  Kim tells me that today we had a short outage and all seemed to work as planned.  Bahuta acchā!

An amusing thing about the delivery of this unit … Saturday I received a call.  Was hard to make out what the other party was saying, but I eventually understood that there was a parcel for me at the local post office and that I needed to come by and pick it up.  So Monday myself and driver Rupesh make our way there and indeed it is the UPS.  Rupesh asked, why was the package not delivered to the address?  For answer they indicated this label on the package:

So, from a spirit of diligence they decided that “transporting” the package to my flat was forbidden.

I forebore from asking what miraculous agency had gotten the package to the post office in the first place …