I think I remember my brother telling me that the American expatriate Paul Bowles once attempted to make some ethnographic recordings somewhere in Africa (probably Morocco, since he lived there for many decades). After awhile trying to get the tape recorder to work, he (or one of his assistants) figured out that it was an AC-only machine, and the mains power was DC. Embarrassed and disappointed, he tried to explain the problem to his hosts.
They said something like, "That's OK, you can come back when the electricity is right." As if electricity were weather, and changed daily!
