Shanghai has developed so fast, but when dealing with state-owned companies it’s still like the old days: frustration, frustration, frustration. A nice (or actually not-so-nice) example happened this week, when on Wednesday a note from the Shanghai Power company arrived that our electricity would be cut off for a while on Friday. My first reaction was: nice, at least they inform us. But when reading the whole thing I got upset, because the power would be cut from 5 AM to 2 PM! During a normal working day, right before a one-week National Holiday. And as you can imagine, an online gaming company does not work very well without power.

We made some phone calls and found out that the reason is that they are building a new subway line next to our office. That’s nice to know, but why can they not cut the power from 9 PM to 6 AM, or during the weekend? They probably did not even consider that, because why should you be customer oriented when you have a monopoly? Our office building has about 70 internet companies, and none of them can do any work this morning. So I had to give the staff half a day off, and I now hope that the electricity will be turned back on by 2 PM.