I'm going to ask you if you want to be a chorus boy / You can mime the tragedy while we all sing along

A month and bit away, you forget....

• at the office today the power on the second floor, which just happens to be my one, all went down
• even when it's on it's such a low wattage that we continually blow it all the time by just plugging in something like a fan
• we paid some guy US$800 as an unofficial 'fee' in May to upgrade it in 'a few days'. He now won't take our calls but the guys who work for him said, when they turned up to repair it, some six hours after they said they'd arrive, that it was now 'sata minggu saja sampai listrik siap' (one more week). Sure.
• then the internet, which was running on go slow, which is saying something where 50kbs is 'broadband', simply stopped. The ever reliable internet company (as in ever reliably, unreliable) sent someone who said that it was because we had turned the router off. We had not and it magically began to work without his assistance although we had to sign a bit of paper to say it was our doing. As soon as he left it died again. I rang the company, whose help desk seems vaguely literate, and they said it was a repeater issue all along, down the road. That I'd signed a bit of paper taking full responsibility seemed to be neither here nor there. Whatever. It came back on shortly after but was even slower.
• the power guys fixed the power on my floor and said it was a dodgy thingy in the power box and it would be fine now. Ten minutes after they left it blew again. I gave up and decide to read the Jakarta Post online, using an extension lead up the the stairs. The story that most intrigued me was the one about the new tax guy in Indonesia, who seems, sadly, to be as tainted as the rest of them. I guess after winning the election, albeit with some controversy , SBY has taken the firm decision to take a breather in the fight against the corruption that eats Indonesia alive, and it's business as usual for the boys.
• then I came home and saw that the cellphone bill was $30 this month...it was so high this month as we'd used roaming extensively.