Good old NStar

[rsc]

Somewhere in a comment a few days back (which I can't find at the moment), jwg mentioned the 5-minute power failure we had Sunday evening. The next day I noticed in the paper that there had been a brief power failure over much of eastern Massachusetts that evening, and assumed that that was waht we had experienced. But no -- the widespread failure was about an hour and a half later (I did note a brief flickering of lights while I was preparing dinner).

Since then, we've twice (Tuesday and today) come down in the morning to find the answering machine blinking, the computers shut down, and the kitchen clock a few minutes behind. I'd be tempted to call NStar (the power company) to find out what's going on, except that I know that I won't find out. A responsible company would have sent out warnings, or (if these were entirely unplanned events) apologies, by now. But this is NStar.

Comments

[bitty.livejournal.com]

Mmmmmm... monopolies...

[rsc.livejournal.com]

Well, technically they aren't ... oh, I suppose at the delivery point they are. Screw it.

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

That sounds really annoying.

Your power company seems to be related to ours.

[jss]

Yeah, I had the statewide brownout (reset the answering machine clock, and both the TV and cable box reset (the cable box stayed down 30-60 seconds for a hard reset; the TV came right back); everything else was fine) and another one last night (again, only the answering machine clock died; everything else kept time). And have an announced scheduled outage window of 2-3 30-minute outages between 2am and 10am on Sunday the 4th (alternate 11th) 18th (alternate 25th) with a 508 area code number for a recording to call if I have questions.

NStar. Feh. Not that ComEd was any better (Illinois), or TU Electric (Texas). All utility companies suck.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

The annoying thing is that our answering machine loses not only its clock but its outgoing message, which has to be rerecorded (yes, bratman, I turned off the radio this time) every time the power goes out for any time at all. (The one in Gloucester, a similar but not identical model, has a backup battery.) The VCRs are fine, and we've only got a couple of clocks that need to be reset. Having the computers reboot is a pain but survivable.

And have an announced scheduled outage window of 2-3 30-minute outages

Announced? We get those occasionally, but if we got any kind of "announcement" about this one I missed it.

number for a recording to call if I have questions.

Questions like "What the fuck are you doing turning off my power four times in the space of a week?"

[jss]

No, it's a recording for things like "The work is being done now" or "The work was rescheduled to next weekend" or "We're done, hope we inconvenienced you." If you want to ask "WTF are you doing turning off my power four times in the space of a week," that's what the 800-number is for.

I stand by my statement: All utility companies suck.