Some days recently in Auckland we've woken feeling ourselves strangers in a strange land. A fortnight ago, for example, evening rush-hour traffic came to a standstill when a cow jumped off a barge moored at the wharves and caused havoc on one of the motorways through the city centre.

When your morning newspaper has a policeman firing pepper spray into the face of a bewildered bovine before getting out the lasso you really have to wonder.

And people here have been wondering about quite a lot of things lately. Like, how come the gateway city to this country has had no power in its central business district? And just why did the electricity company, Mercury Energy, let things get to this state?

We live in curious times and no more peculiar than when the general manager of Mercury was given to making public statements. He is Dr Patrick Strange. This sounds like comic book stuff. Then again, we live in Gotham City. Strangers in a strange land.

It's now three weeks since the largest city in New Zealand lost electricity in its central business district. At first, the jokes about our new Third World status were amusing. Then the truth was known. Hanoi doesn't have this problem, nor does Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, or Ulan Bator in remote Mongolia.

Auckland now has the dubious and embarrassing honour of being the only First World nation to have power problems even Third World cities have overcome. Even so, it hasn't been all gloom: downtown you can still get sushi, although not much else.

On the city's main thoroughfare, Queen Street, the air has thickened with diesel fumes as noisy generators clutter the footpaths to keep small shops open, often in the absence of customers who have been told to stay out of the central business district by a mayor whose career looks mortally wounded.

When the crisis first struck, Aucklanders were oddly resigned: we've had a water crisis in a region where it rains most of the year, a harbour foreshore which has oil tanks and containers on its prime real estate, and a public transport infrastructure which virtually guarantees you need a car but affords you few places to park.

And now a power crisis?

If this was the failure of the free market vision of former Labour finance minister Sir Roger Douglas, who led the rush to privatisation, then few were amused or gloating. And the ironies of a failing free market economy were visible on the streets as the business community - loudest in hailing Douglas's vision - bailed out of their high rises and, along with secretaries and the office photocopier, headed off home to work on the dining-room table.

Certainly, the manner in which Mercury Energy was privatised did not enjoy public support. The company has spent considerable time and money on what we might call "power playing". Insignificant stuff like maintaining cables seems to have been accorded lower priority.

But there's also another view, one slightly less popular if you articulate it: that the Kiwi "she'll be right" attitude was pushed to the extreme. As daily newspapers uncovered yet another scandal (they knew the cables were suspect years ago), you also had to consider that a lot of people just figured things would probably work out OK in the long run anyway.

And in country which tends to pride itself on its mythical ability to "fix anything with a piece of No 8 fencing wire", there was something depressing in seeing news footage of Mercury repair men down a hole winding what appeared to be coloured tape around an offending cable.

It just looked amateurish, and even more embarrassing when the footage turned up on CNN.

As those four crucial cables failed one after another, the company proved itself inept in that most important aspect of business, public relations. When the final cable gave out, Mercury chairman Jim Macaulay said this was "the most incredible freakish bad luck you could possibly imagine".

Next up to the crease was Mercury's chief executive Wayne Gilbert, an Australian with a union-busting reputation whose icy, tight-lipped antipodean monotone was hardly winning. He is the least telegenic of them all and his mantra of "if the board want my resignation they can have it" hasn't gone down especially well.

And that's putting it charitably.

We figure we'll get to him later, once he's got the lights back on.

But when the company failed to show at a crisis meeting of city retailers and residents you knew that, when it came to doing PR badly, these boys were in a class of their own.

And then out comes Dr Strange.

What ordinary people have been doing is getting on with their lives, albeit in shirt sleeves and dripping with sweat as temperatures rise and the air conditioning fails. We bought candles, ate out more and imposed ourselves on friends in the suburbs. And the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra performed for the first time without tuxedos.

Things have settled down now. The dark days are behind us we joke weakly.

I had to sympathise with one cafe-owner on Queen Street this week who lost her generator prematurely. She turned her back and it seems it was towed away. Police suspect crooks who use generators to help them grow cannabis.

It's a very strange land some days.

Graham Reid is a feature writer with the New Zealand Herald