It’s never a good thing when “something” wakes you up at 02:27 and you can’t quite put your finger on it laying there in the dark.
Then you realize that you’re up to your eyeballs in “dark” – what happened to the light from the clock, the cable box, the night light, the light from the kitchen night lights… Well, the winds are HOWLING again, so I guess that’s not too surprising? It’s tough to make sense of things when it’s 02:28.
Okay, the power’s out. But why is there still light from the street lights? Maybe they’re on a different circuit of some sort?
By the light of the ever-present cellphone, I got into some sweats and went exploring, cautious of the possibility that there might be a loose wire down out there. And the first immediate odd thing is that there are houses up and down the street with lights.
Is it us? Check the breaker box, toggle the master circuit breaker, doesn’t make any difference.
A closer examination shows that the houses on either side of us are dark, and the two houses directly across the street. But everyone else is fine.
Watson, by the power of logical deduction, I have determined that something has gone wonky on the power pole across the street. Wouldn’t it feed those five houses and not any of the others?
Having some idea of what’s going on (or at least an educated guess) I get on my phone to put in an outage report with DWP. Then I fall asleep out on the couch. Fitfully.
My only real concern is the two refrigerator/freezer units. But as long as we keep the doors closed, they should be good for a bunch of hours.
At about 05:00 I hear a truck outside and go hustling out. But it’s not DWP, it’s Spectrum. Their driver says that he was sent out because there’s a cluster of several houses here that have gone offline. Yep, that would be us, but I think we need DWP. He’ll have Spectrum follow up with DWP.
I check my phone again and find that DWP has left several voice mails, but been blocked because, A) It’s the middle of the freaking night, and B) they’re calling from a number that’s not in my phone books, so my phone is treating them as spammers. Okay, yes, that’s what I’ve programmed and it’s a good little robot phone, but timing is everything. I call DWP back and they want to know if I still need help. Yes, thank you, that would be why I put in an outage report. (How come the cable company knows about this and they don’t?!)
About 08:45 the DWP rolls up and I go out to let them know what I know. Uh, duh, dude, and the guy points at the power pole. (Okay, trying to be helpful, but I was probably being a stereotype from some ad.)
Well, THERE‘s your problem! That cable on the left isn’t supposed to be hanging loose like that.
We sit around for a while waiting for a truck with a bucket lift on it, then it’s time to be rescued from the Dark Ages.
On the side of the transformer, up near the top, there’s a bump or wart. That’s where that wire should connect. So they grab that dangling wire (carefully), unscrew the clamps on that bump/wart and clean out the debris, strip an inch or two of insulation off of the end of the dangling wire, and insert it into the side of the bump/wart thing. There was a very satisfying ZZAAAAAAAPPP!! and flash. They clamped the bump/wart thing back down, and we were again on speaking terms with with the electrons.
Then I went to get breakfast and got stuck behind the long-winded, annoying dude from Hell.
Then I got home and found out that they had messed up my breakfast order.
And DAMN IT, I took too long to type this out, it’s after midnight! As of yesterday I had another streak of 245 days in a row posting on the site, and while this will count in my head, it breaks the streak so far as WordPress is concerned.
SHAZZBATT!!!
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 