I was in blackout and parents haven’t even texted me

[Stopeatingcrispsanddips]

I live in one of the countries where there was a power cut, it was frightening at the time and still feels a bit unsettling. My parents haven’t even WhatsApped us to see how we are (they still live in the U.K.)

Is this normal?

It wasn’t planned.

you can’t be a child of the 70s and still in your forties. I am born in 1986, I grew up
in the 90s.
in any case you must be at the very very youngest 47, so sniping “im not in my fifties” just makes you seem obtuse.

in any case im sorry you were disappointed by the lack of care from your parents. There are only really 2 possibilities - they didn’t know / realise how serious it felt for people in the countries affected, or they don’t really care or think to text you about things like this. Only you will know what the likely answer is so I don’t know what you hope to gain by arguing with people.

Wasn’t it just a power cut or am I missing something? Surely you survived a few hours without electricity. Maybe FB needed to do ‘safe from blackout’ option!

In all seriousness maybe a text saying were you affected would be nice, but maybe they knew nothing about it.

I have to be honest @Stopeatingcrispsanddips i only heard about it the day afterwards and didn’t really pay much attention.
reading your posts reminded me how we felt after storm Eowyn though where we lost everything including phones internet etc and that was the scary side of things….. we’re used to power cuts due to extreme weather but never lost the phones, internet, water etc!
I strongly suspect they simply didn’t realize the impact of what happened!
x

You don’t know for sure if they saw it. It’s not been big new in uk. They might have thought you wouldn’t receive messages so waited to hear from you. Unless you are in something you often don’t realise how significant it is.

What papers are you reading?? It was definitely the top story in the Guardian, Times, Telegraph and BBC throughout Monday and into Tuesday morning. They also had live news feeds running all day. It would also have been impossible to turn on the TV or radio news and not hear constant updates about it.

Yes it was.

Confused by you not being in your 50s but being a child of the 70s? At the youngest you’re 46, which rounds up to 50 so to give a snarky reply seems very immature, and for the purposes of this situation 46 is no different to being in your 50s. If you were under 25 and not used to living independently then it would be different but I’d expect someone of your age group to be capable of dealing with the situation without needing an R U OK? Text from mummy and daddy

Maybe not the news outlets you're following but all the main ones had it plastered over the front pages online, including BBC News who even had a page dedicated to Live updates.

From the replies here, I think you can see the probable reason why your parents didn’t message you.

We heard the news here in the UK, it was top of the agenda for much of the day, but the word ‘power cut’ doesn’t carry much drama. It sounds annoying rather than anything else.

It’s only while reading this thread that I’ve really thought about how scary it must have been. The complete disconnect from news media or the outer world, the not being able to use a phone or bank card, the idea of being in a tube in a tunnel and it suddenly going black. But much worse, not knowing why - it’s like being in one of those futuristic films where some unknown power is taking over.

For those saying ‘I was a child in the 70s’. This is nothing like the same situation. We don’t think we were under cyber attack in the 70s - it was annoying and depressing for people but not menacing. And also, people’s lives did not revolve around technology like the internet and digital banking, as it does today. Completely different situation.

Anyway OP, it’s taken me this thread to really engage with what it must have been like - and I watch the news a lot!

OP I don’t think people on this thread realise that literally everything went down in all parts of Spain and Portugal for hours and no one knew why it had happened or how long it would last.
I don’t think you’re being unreasonable at all. I would also expect my parents to have tried to contact me to make sure I was ok and I’d certainly hope to hear from them when power was eventually restored and messages started to come through. I saw plenty about it here in the UK, though accept that I probably am presented with more news about Spain because of sites snd pages I follow.

Have you never had a blackout/power outage? It’s something that happens occasionally and people cope with. Longest one here was 5 days. What would be the point of people messaging, we couldn’t respond! It’s just something adults live with and the assumption is you get on with it. Unless on a ventilator or have medical equipment, medication that needs to be refrigerated etc? Here, it that’s the case, you need to register and they come get you and take to a central spot with generators etc if needed.

I don't get why people are downplaying this. Society is so dependent on electricity that a huge outage like this would be massively disruptive as well as frightening. To those saying it was barely in the news, that just isn't true. In the UK it was headlines everywhere. The most disturbing thing was not the power cut itself, but the possible cause - an attack by a hostile state.

So posters can be as rude and snippy to OP as they like but she can't say anything back? That's not how it works.

Two whole countries having a total blackout at the same time, losing access to absolutely everything, isn't a normal occurrence. The world is so volatile at the moment, it is fine for OP to have a fleeting thought, as I'm sure other people did, that something awful had happened.

Did you think you were under cyber attack during those 5 days? Did you go to the shops to buy food and discover the lights were off everywhere, your bank card didn’t work (not in the next town, either) and you had no cash? Did you discover there was no access to news, and no one knew what was going on or how long it would last?

Seems like you’re missing the point.

I’m in EU and don’t know anything about it until late last night when it was over.

We lost power for over 14 hours a while back. No big deal.

I don't get how a text message from your 70 year old parents in a different country that you aren't going to even receive until the power comes backs helps with anything though.

How on earth is this post rude? It wasn't even addressed to you. Some of the responses to OP have been breathtakingly rude and twatty yet if OP has the temerity to respond in kind, these oh so resilient posters get very upset.

Same! Candle and matches held in storage, wood and water and canned food too.
One year, snowed in and power cut for 2.5 days! Had to walk 1.5 miles in snow to nearest B road as couldn't get car out to make it to somewhere colleague could pick me up for work!
@Stopeatingcrispsanddips why didn't you text them? Or did you just stare at the phone gathering your wrath?

To be fair, I'd heard about power outages but haven't seen any major news stories about it. Although I don't religiously look for news outside my own bubble.

That said, YOU could have sent a quick text to your parents to reassure them that, if they saw the news, you were safe. That would be my go to if a major issue happened that affected me. When covid broke, despite me being no contact with my parents, I sent them a message to say we were fine and I hoped they were too.

I think the poster who said your parents were participating in a test that they were not aware of hits the nail on the head. I wonder if geographical distance means you generally feel more isolated from their weekly or fortnightly contact, and perhaps this reaction is a symptom of that rather than any annoyance that they've not been in touch. send them a message to let them know what's going on in your area and see what happens from there.

Why would she take on board the replies from complete twats trying to be as rude and dismissive as possible?

Given the outraged responses of these posters to a slightly snippy reply from OP, I really doubt their declarations of resilience and how the power blackout wouldn't have bothered them at all.

It was a power cut for ffs not a terrorist attack! If you were in a war zone maybe!

It was a power cut, not an earthquake or a hurricane. I doubt if they were worried about you and they maybe thought the power wouldn't be off for long.