Power Cuts & I Watch Too Many Scary Movies

Sometimes my blog post ideas come to me at the most random times.  Today that random moment was in the shower.  For some reason while I was in the shower today my mind immediately jogged back to earlier this year and the scariest shower moment I’ve ever had in my life.  It happened in Jamaica and it happened during a power cut.  I swear I could start a whole blog called,

“Events that happen during power cuts in Jamaica”.

I have many, many friends island-wide that I travel to see and stay with for a few days at a time while enjoying their parts of Jamaica.  If there’s one thing all these friends have in common, it’s that they ALL have windows in their showers….at boob height….with no curtains.  So no matter what, there is always the potential that someone in those neighborhoods gets a free show when I shower at night with the lights on.

For this particular story I was staying at a family yard.  The house is very large and sectioned off into several apartments where various family members live separately, yet together.  I was staying in the ground level apartment where my friend and his sons live, except this one night I was alone in the apartment because he was at work and I came home from my daily adventures before he was finished.  His children were in the upper level with the grandmother.

Since I had nothing to do I decided to take my usual evening cool-off bathe in the shower with the window at boob height, with the lights on.  It was pretty late so I figured everyone would be close to sleeping and for sure no one would be roaming at that side of the property in the dark.

There I am going about my business in the shower when all of a sudden the lights turn off.  Immediately I’m paralyzed because if you’ve seen darkness in the countryside in Jamaica you know it’s PITCH dark.  So there I stand in the shower, scared shitless and my first instinct is to call the name of the guy who lives there thinking he came home and did this as a joke.  I called his name…..no response.  Then out the corner of my eye I saw someone move past the window outside.  I still stood there paralyzed because I had no idea if it was him or someone else and I was too scared to come out of the shower…..as if the shower curtain could protect me.  My mind jumped to all the scary movie shower scenes I’ve ever seen and I thought that ultimately my life was going to end up there on a mountain top in rural Jamaica.

I somehow managed to find my towel in the dark, wrapped it around me and reached for my cell phone on the bathroom vanity.  I turned on my cell phone flashlight to illuminate the bathroom but I was still scared to exit that room into the rest of the apartment.  Wet, naked and afraid.  Sounds like a survival TV show I know.

I tip-toed into the bedroom where my clothes were, as if tip-toeing would somehow make this whole situation less scary and dramatic.  I quickly threw on my clothes and again, tip-toed around the corner into the living area where the front door is.  Just as I noticed the front door was still deadbolted the power came back on.  Hallelujah!

When my friend got home from work I told him about the whole thing and he just laughed and laughed, and said he WISHED it was him who played it all as a joke.  Nice friend!  The next morning we found out it was the brother who was outside the bathroom window and ever since then I’ve wondered WHY.  You know when the lights are on you can’t see out a window in the dark so how long was he out there getting a free show?  Or did he just come down there after the power cut to check on things?

I’ll never know those answers but I’m still alive so if someone saw my boobs I guess I’ll be okay.

For more entertaining power-cut stories in Jamaica you can visit these posts:

Jamaica Power Cuts are Great

The Night the Lights Went Out on Jamrock

Aliens and the CIA in Jamaica