This is getting tiresome

[rsc]

I've already mentioned the power failure we had Wednesday night. It seems to have affected our immediate neighborhood -- roughly the area bounded by West Street, Lee Street, Broadway, and Inman Street -- and what I neglected to mention is that there had been one such about 10 days earlier, that struck at about midnight, when we were about two minutes short of finishing watching our TiVo-recording of Wonder Boys¹, leaving us with little choice but to go to bed. That one lasted about two hours (we were awakened by the sound of the TV coming on).

So last night we had another one, at about 7:00 PM, just as we were getting ready to get some supper out of the refrigerator, but without either the toaster or the microwave available this wasn't going to work very well. Fortunately the power came back after about half an hour, before we had had a chance to make up our minds about going out for dinner. jwg pointed out that they're getting steadily shorter, and this last one at least didn't cost us any television.

There were a lot of these during the summer, as we would discover when we came from Gloucester to pick up the mail and discovered that the answering machine had lost its outgoing message.² There have also been several notices from NStar announcing scheduled power outages in the middle of the night, as they work on fixing some systemic problem in the area. (Oh, really?) Some of these scheduled outages have actually occurred.

There's another one scheduled for this Tuesday night, when we will be safely out of the way in the Caribbean. Maybe this time they'll actually get it right.

I am so not impressed with NStar.

¹Which reminds me, more naked Robert Downey, Jr., please.

²We really need to get one with battery backup.

Comments

[ranger1.livejournal.com]

I wonder what's going on. Is the power network in Cambridge that crufty?

[rsc.livejournal.com]

I honestly don't know. Maybe there's a bad transformer somewhere near us. But you'd think that would be a simple one-shot deal to replace, wouldn't you?