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Commentary: The Invisible People Who Keep the Lights On That were NOT at the World Economic Form – Irina Slav


These translations are done via Google Translate

By Irina Slav

More From Irina Slav

It’s WEF week and if this year’s gathering in Davos has made anything clear it is that the WEF has come to mean Worldwide Everything F-Up. With a loud bang at the end of the road. But I’m not going to talk about WEF today. Everyone’s talking about WEF and the WEF talkers themselves are nothing to talk about. Today I’d like to talk about the invisible people that keep civilisation running.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me this story from a local Vermont news outlet. I highly recommend it even if you’re utterly disinterested in electricity transmission and distribution because it is a brilliant example of what actual news reporting looks like. Since there’s a grave shortage of that kind of reporting in today’s media world, any reminders that it still exists should be celebrated.

On to the topic, the story is about the invisible people who keep the lights on and when for one reason or another the lights go out, it’s those same invisible people who go out regardless of weather and terrain, and turn the lights back on. The only time we think about them is when there’s a power outage and we don’t tend to think about them gratefully, not at all.

I once tried to picture all the people who:

  • sit at power plants and make sure they produce enough power for demand at any one moment
  • react immediately when output for some reason threatens to slip below demand
  • monitor the grid in their area ready to respond to outages
  • get out in the middle of the night on December 31 to fix a fault that has caused an outage across a neighbourhood, a village, a town
  • spend two days fixing a water pump that clearly needs replacing but the municipality that owns it cannot afford a new one
  • dig up streets to replace antiquated water pipes and endure the hate of everyone living in the area affected by the works for weeks
  • field unfriendly calls from customers demanding to know when the lights/water will be back and what’s taking them so long
  • listen to wealthy cricket meal enthusiasts extolling the virtues of renewable energy on TV with zero knowledge of how a power system actually works
  • die on the job trying to keep our lights on

I stopped trying to picture all these people when I felt my brain start to simmer. But because the brain is such a cunning thing, it reminded me of all the other invisible people, such as the ones that dig ore out of the ground with monstrous trucks that, to me, are among the pinnacles of human civilisation, so other invisible people can make the wires and pumps that keep the lights on and the water flowing.

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Or the ones who drill the ground for oil and gas, day and night, because even with automated equipment you still need someone to operate it and monitor how it works, around the clock, and anyway you can’t automate everything, not at all. These invisible people are also the indirect target of hate coming from millions of people who genuinely believe if we don’t stop pumping oil from the ground we’re all going to die.

The only time these people become visible is when they die on the job or when they go on strike.

You might well argue here that most of the people in the world are invisible because there are so many jobs involved in keeping a country, a region, a city running it’s simply impossible to notice and appreciate them all. I would agree, of course, but I think it does no harm to anyone if we get reminded of these particular invisible people once in a while.

The thing is that while I have nothing but immense respect for my accountants, for instance, or the civil servants I have to communicate with on occasion, neither group is critical to my — or anyone else’s — physical survival and wellbeing. For my peace of mind — certainly but not for my survival. The people listed above are critical for my survival. And yours.

I realise this is not my usual Friday rant or mockery feast but I did want to take a moment and, cheesy as it sounds, appreciate these people. You know, the way we should appreciate all people whose jobs we never think about but whose jobs most of us would never be able to do because they’re hard and largely thankless.

These are the same people without whom our own jobs and the jobs of many other people we consider vital would be impossible to do.

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