Who turned off the lights?

The hotel generator, which is bigger than some houses I’ve seen here, has been on the blink with increasing frequency for the past two days. That not only means that the rooms get very little air-conditioning, but that there is no water. (Water for bathing. Our drinking water was trucked in from Jordan with us.)

It also means that each time the power goes off, either Dan or I have to scurry around unplugging any electronic equipment we are using. Otherwise, when the power comes back on, it could fry our electrical transformers, at least, or blow out our computers, at worst.

So we take turns charging our laptops and satellite phones in between outages.

We are still trying to figure out how we will get out of the tiny coffin of an elevator if we get trapped inside during a power outage. There doesn’t seem to be a manual door release anywhere, and no phone in the elevator.

Since neither of us speaks much Arabic, I’m not sure what we would say if there was a phone. My repertoire consists of “hello” and “thank you.” Not likely to inspire anyone to come to our rescue.

Does it sound like we are worrying too much? Or not enough?