We will always have the memes: survive the great Spanish Blecaut of 2025

Livão Enari, a New Zealander who lives in Spain, reflects on the huge technological dot that led the Iberian Peninsula.

Damn, I would like to have watched The Walking Dead. I could have received tips on how to deal with life in a dystopian society, which is where I thought we were going on Monday, April 28, around 12:30 pm on my home in Spain.

Time stopped. Just froze. Minutes before, my daughter had sent a rare text to the Whatsapp family: “Power is gone in Madrid. And you?”

Amazing, I thought, the same happened in León, three and a half hours away. I sent a message to my answer, observing the coincidence, but the message remained, the non -cooperative clock icon signaling without luck, no signal.

I tried to play. Nothing. I checked the computer. Meh.

Everything stopped. All. At the same time. Across the country. No PC, no laptop, no cell phone, TV, no internet and “normal” radio. (I predict the sales of traditional, battery operated, AM/FM, long waves and transistors will increase the single device that worked in the blecau). I was alone and could not communicate with anyone who was not in my physical space. Incommunicated. The fact that I didn’t have my choice to be alone and isolated was to reach me. My normal work, watching people, was not enough.

The cars were packing the supermarket parking lot on the road and I recognized a family, the college daughter included, carrying shopping bags, five -liter water bottles and, of course, toilet paper. Memories of the pandemic shone before my eyes.

My hunger for information and human contact pushed me into the crowd of supermarkets. There were students and parents in abundance. “All the cyber attack doesn’t worry me,” said one student, “but not being able to use my phone is coming to me.” His mother rolled her eyes.

Another mother stayed with her children, my students, around a cart full of huge bottles of mineral water. “That’s what it is,” she said. “These are the moments when we live and we have to continue,” she shrugged.

How stoic and very different from her, I thought, and turned to her daughter, and that I realized. The normally shy mother was wearing a brave face for her girl, whose eyes were watery, tremendous lips. “Nervous,” she said when I asked how she was.

Outside, a man told me that he had the surreal feeling of being in a science fiction movie and at any moment there would be an explosion of light and we would disintegrate in the air. It’s aliens, someone shouted, because suddenly I was surrounded by teenagers leaving school. It’s Putin, shouted another. No, it’s Trump, the answer returned.

A mother told me that her family in Switzerland had told her that she had also lost minutes of energy before losing WhatsApp. Another told me that he heard Italy and Croatia were also affected.

Later we discovered. The traffic lights stopped working, the trains had ceased in the middle of Journey, the underground trains were stuck in tunnels, the flights were canceled, passengers trapped at airports. Nurses in ICU units nervously touched the old manual respiratory pumps when the generators gave in. It was the largest energy cut in the history of a country of more than 48 million inhabitants, which translates into many confusing and angry flights, trains and passengers and a generally anxious population. People gathered for supermarkets and, taking a day off work, the bars. So Spanish and so good, I thought.

Automatic doors had closed with customers inside, elevators who carry the elderly suffered the same, remote controls for community garages stopped working, nor intercom systems, and bells in people trust to enter their homes. Students everywhere were screaming to Windows for someone to let them in. Numerous people who want to have lunch in restaurants and bars across the country could not pay with their phones, nor their cards, and they could not withdraw money.

My classes were spent in the park in the spring, the light of the night to save, talking about what you would do if you would die next week. I thought it was appropriate. Go to Doweling, Draxtalism, Bungee Jumping and the like, said my disinterested group. Rob a bank, said an implement, but he had no plan. Getting to an ice cream shop and dying surrounded by all the flavors was the best of a batch without imagination.

The next day we discovered everything, and nothing. All passengers of difficulties had to endure, the elderly of anguish suffered, the general anxiety suffered by parents and grandparents. Teenagers and children seemed unaffected. It should have happened and the school would have been canceled, it was his general opinion.

Young geniuses from the aeronautical engineering diploma I have the privilege of teaching were also incredibly not confused and therefore about it. We have the exams with what to worry about, it was the attitude.

Not death, destruction and disaster, I thought to myself. Perhaps it was a generational thing, as this huge technological brightness seems to have bothered us more with the elders than others. Two days later, and there are still many unanswered questions.

Students with family and friends in Poland and Germany say their contacts said the same happened in these countries, but it lasted only half an hour. It lasted only seven hours in which I live, but the villages in the Mountains of Leon had 24 hours before normal service resumed.

My daughter was fine, but it took three and a half hours to get home – one hour crawling in a car and two and a half hours walking in all directions without internet to guide it.

Now that our nerves have calmed down, this can simply fall like a powerful storm in a cup of tea, which reminded us of the country’s beauty and functionality, where you can make a fire to cook. It must assemble us in the opposite direction of all this super -restrained dependence on telephone and technology. But above all, when the many memes being pumped by the often hilarious Spaniards began to reach the media in mind. It was simply to be cynical and funny when I first read him, but because of this humor, he sounds even more true.

He said, “Remember that after all this we will leave the other side as better people.” Mute love since España.