Things I Won’t Miss About My Apartment, Vol. IV
So, it’s 0306. I’d turned out the light at 0002. I’m awake. Why? It’s really, really quiet.
A minute passes. beep-beep-beep Power’s out. I lay in bed, thinking it’s a standard Huntsville Utilities-on-the-mountain outage. A half-hour or so passes, and I begin to tire of the every-minute beep-beep-beep of my uninterruptible power supplies. [I have three: one in my office, and one for each TiVo. Laugh if you want.] I decide to get out of bed and find my phone. Thankfully, I don’t kill myself maneuvering through the apartment in the pitch dark.
As I get to my phone—visible from the blinking green status light—I realize that other lights are on in my complex. No wonder this thing hasn’t been fixed yet—it’s not a substation outage. I log on to the Web to find Huntsville Utilities’ number [Treo 1, utilities 0], call them, and the guy has me walk outside to make sure that the outage is building-wide and not apartment wide. It is, so they send a truck. I put on more clothes and await the truck.
Around 0410, the truck pulls in, and soon, they have their diagnosis—dead transformer. They wait for another truck to bring them a replacement, and I walk back inside and climb back in bed. Predictably, I can’t sleep, since it’s stuffy and absolutely quiet in my bedroom. [I sleep with a fan and an AM radio on at night. It's the only way I sleep well.] Finally, at 0608, the power returns. Having slept only three hours, I then go back to sleep.
I am really ready to move. [Nine days until I close, and a month after that, I move in.]
(embarrassed) ….my Tivo and cable box are on a UPS too….
Could be worse, though, you could have American Electric Power as your utility. They like to wait until they have “enough” calls in a given area to believe there is really an outage. Last summer we had a roughly street-wide outage hit at about 9:15 in the morning. (In other words, just after the entire neighborhood was cleared out for work in the morning.) Working from home, it obviously put a crimp in my work day. I called them to report it. At about noon, with no visible sign of a repair truck in the neighborhood, I called back. They seemed to have no record of my first report. They said they’d know something in about “2 hours”. Called back at about 2. Again, “There have been no reports of an outage in your area.” Riiiiight. They said they’d know more in “about 2 hours.” I’m not sure why I didn’t go off on them right then, but it was the unlucky sap on the 4 PM call who got the ear-full. Finally at about 5, an AEP truck drove down the street. Power was back on within 20 minutes.
If I hadn’t had 2 other outages >24 hours in the 5 years I’ve lived in AEP-land, I wouldn’t be so cynical…
April 20th, 2005 at 12:35This is quite a common problem in the Utility industry. There’s no real reason for them to give much of a crap; you can’t switch power companies. Luckily, my company doesn’t do much lolling around when people call.
April 21st, 2005 at 14:20