ABSTRACT
Imagine that all of a sudden, on a torridly hot Saturday afternoon, the water supply and the power are turned off due to a blunder in the road reconstruction in front of the house. It takes the workers about five hours to bring them back up. As a consequence, the washing machine and the dishwasher stop running, the refrigerator and the freezer start defrosting, and the computer quits right in the middle of sending a long e-mail message. The toilet does not flush and the cold shower one might crave for on such a day has to be postponed. On top of that, the air conditioning shuts down.
