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Only cash was useable.

I had another interesting cashless world episode. Friday evening my brother & I arrived at our parents beach home, we are sorting the place out after being unused for a long period, my father had been unwell and passed away. My mother wants to spend more time there with the family but it needs some TLC.

The home is in a small coastal town about 2.5 hours from the city. We arrived at about 8pm, had a late dinner and then started sending text messages and making phone calls to our family to say that we had arrived safely.

However, we ran into a snag, the internet and cellular network was. down. The house both our phones, my phone and my brothers laptop dongle were useless for communication purposes.

At around 9:30pm we decided to got to the pub, only to find that the whole town had lost communication with the outside world. No connection with any provider. The Pubs EFTPOS was out, only cash was useable. The publican said that he had lost about 75% of business becasue customers did not have cash, which meant the pub had to close at 10pm on a usually busy Friday night.

Saturday morning was pretty much the same, except I was able o call land lines from my mobile, but not mobile to mobile. The pub and shops had limited access, which allowed them to accept EFTPOS with a few attempts.

By 9:30pm Saturday everything was back to normal.