A burst tyre at the side of the road, just 5km before Warden, and a next-to-flat cellphone battery got me thinking about just how important being able to call someone is.
We don't often think about it, but we have all become so used to technology that we cannot function without it.
I am used to picking up the phone - cellular or fixed - and being able to communicate; ditto being able to draw cash out of an ATM, or swipe the debit card if I don't want to carry cash. And many of the people I speak to also prefer swiping some or other card than taking large sums out of the ATM, due to the risk of being alleviated of their loot.
More importantly, from a personal point of view, being able to place a call home, hands-free, while driving a long distance is vital for me. What if I suddenly could not do that?
In the dark
After what seemed like an eternity on the road, I finally made it to Umdloti. On the off-ramp, the conversation I was having ended, suddenly, as there was no signal.
There was no cellphone signal in the entire seaside town, and no ATMs worked, and credit card machines were useless. Ditto for landlines.
Many of the people I speak to also prefer swiping some or other card than taking large sums out of the ATM, due to the risk of being alleviated of their loot.
Nicola Mawson, group financial editor
Whether it was the Telkom strike, I don't know, although this seems like the most likely explanation for the predicament.
But I still had phone calls to make, and the battery - briefly charged at the Wimpy in Harrismith - was again dead. I headed back down the freeway towards Durban and stopped at a BP. Plugging the charger into a wall socket in the staff rest room, I made my calls.
The cellular signal, and all the other aspects of trade that had gone down at about 3pm on Friday, in Umdloti, finally came back up mid-morning on Saturday. Thankfully, as the small amount of cash I had drawn in Harrismith was dwindling. Who carries cash anymore?
Lost revenue
At lunch on Sunday, in the little strip-mall that is Umdloti's centre of activity, I asked a waitress how much money they had lost due to the break in signal. She had no idea.
I can only guess what the loss must have been: it was a long weekend, many people had driven down, as the radio reports attested to, and I imagine that the bulk of the trade would have been paid for through plastic and not cash.
I heard tales of people having to hand in their credit cards to the barkeeper at the local pub as security.
The damage was not limited to Umdloti. Driving back on Monday, an East Coast Radio presenter said he had been without ADSL since Friday afternoon. Who knows how widespread the outage was?
And who can quantify what a weekend of no connectivity meant for the economy in the province? And for Telkom, which backhauls much of the traffic to banks, cellphones, fixed lines and credit card machines.
Perhaps the lesson is that we rely too much on technology, and when it goes out, so does business - big and small. We take the technology that makes our lives work for granted, something we should not do. I won't make that mistake again.
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