Durban - With the country now effectively always roaming between Stage 4 and Stage 6 load shedding, more South Africans are coming to narrate their plight with the practice by Eskom which claims it is aimed at preventing a complete collapse of the grid.
One South African has explained how he nearly missed out on a lucrative teaching job in Taiwan where he was to teach English.
Most overseas jobs pay in US dollars, which when later converted to rands, improve the standard of living for locals and bring much-needed foreign currency.
James Browning of Cape Town was offered a job to teach English to these Taiwanese students.
One of the extra benefits for him was that he was not going to relocate to Taiwan in order to take the job.
Since Taiwan is technologically advanced and it has long embraced online teaching, he was to be based in South Africa.
However, he had to be available and log in at specific times to teach English to Chinese Mainland students.
That then proved to be a challenge because of load shedding.
Browning said he had to postpone signing the contract until he bought a back-up power facility for his laptop.
“I couldn’t take the job because I couldn't guarantee working hours, it was a teaching gig, an online teaching gig.
“And obviously I couldn't commit to having a class at a certain time every week because I couldn’t guarantee I would have electricity at that time.
“That was before, I recently got back-up power for my laptop so that I can actually run my laptop or my PC during load shedding.
“Obviously that also means back-up power for my internet and for my router, I can now do that work,” he said.
He added that what was even more frustrating was that the load shedding schedule did not stay the same and as such, he could not even negotiate certain times for him to log in and offer lessons.
Browning said the challenge of load shedding was an impediment to many other South Africans who are doing remote jobs.
“Anyone who is working remote jobs or people overseas or local employees understands that load shedding is a thing they can’t escape.
“This is the case for anyone who has to work remote work; they don’t have reliable access to electricity, which means they don’t have reliable access to their devices which they work on.”
sihle.mavuso@inl.co.za
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