Tag Archives: electricity

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Delmarva Power. There’s an issue with my power bill. I called their “customer service” number Monday night and was met with a 50-minute estimated wait time. That’s not going to happen, so I called back Tuesday morning. The wait time for that call was a sleek 27-32 minutes. They split the difference and I waited half an hour to be immediately told by the CSR that the system is down and they can’t answer any questions. They did offer to call back when their system is up, which is fine I guess, but what I really want is to determine when I talk to my vendors myself rather than sitting around looking forlorn like a 14 year old girl waiting for her true love to call. After blasting them on social media, someone did reach our to me and promised I’d get a call back “sometime” in the “next few business days”. Fifty hours later. Still waiting.

2. Staffing. In order to send any information outside the organization you need approximately 4,587 separate lines of approval. It’s not necessarily hard work, but it is what some might call tedious. Reaching the point where something is approved for release always feels like something of any accomplishment… but the best part is when you get something fully staffed, vetted, socialized, and approved only to be notified two hours after you hit send for the final time that someone at Echelons Higher than Reality has decided to “go a different direction.

3. The sky is falling. Look gang, I’m not a fancy big city investment banker, but despite the thrashing Wall Street has taken this week the sky really isn’t falling (yet). The Dow made its high in May of last year. We’re down in the neighborhood of 10% off that high – that’s the operative definition of a correction – but still a ways off from a bear market. If you haven’t jumped out well before now, the only thing cashing out in this market does is lock in whatever loss you’ve suffered. If I were in danger of retiring next year I’d be a little more worried. As it is, I’d say it’s time to stack some cash and do a bit of hedging. If that doesn’t work for you, just win yourself a Powerball Jackpot and you’re all set.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Everything being bad for you. Sunscreen is bad for you. Sun burns are bad for you. GMO crops feed the world, but they’ll make your kid grow a tail. Egg whites are ok. Egg yellows steal your soul or some such foolishness. As much as I appreciate living in an age of seemingly limitless information, I need to break down one cold, simple truth: We’re all going to die. Some will die young. Some will die old. It’s been that way forever and there’s no current way around it. Everything is bad for you. Everything in the world is trying to make you sick and speed you to your grave… As much as I appreciate people who honestly want to live a healthy lifestyle I just don’t have the mental energy to worry about whether the tomatoes at the Amish market was raised without pesticides or antibiotics in a free range, organic environment. Maybe it should concern me more, but it really, really doesn’t.

2. Delmarva Power. Yes I know I can save money on “peak savings” days by turning off my air conditioner between the hours of 2PM and 8PM when demand is highest. No, I’m not going to do that, though. Your job is to produce and distribute power to satisfy demand – yes even on the hot days – so no I won’t be sweating my ass off in my own home on the next 97 degree day so you can avoid lighting off the last few boilers or skip buying energy from a 3rd party producer. I’ll keep doing my job so I can pay the bills, you go ahead and do yours so we don’t unexpectedly plunge back into the 1870s.

3. Manual signature required. We’re in the year AD 2015. It defies imagination that there is still a situation where I would have to print something out, sign it with a pen, scan it, and then send it back to someone in order for something to be “official.” It’s even more fanciful when we decide to send the same document around for electronic signature “so we have both on file.” Two exact copies of the same document. One signed by pen and then sent back electronically, the other signed by ID card and then sent back electronically… both then printed out and stuffed into a manila folder to be deposited in a file drawer and then not to see the light of day for potentially a decade or more. The fact that this is still how we do things is, sadly, not at all a cause for surprise.

Lit…

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If there’s anything I can say about this house, it’s that when the previous owner built the place they were bound and determined to never want for lighting. At least in the kitchen. With 12 recessed light pots, two pendant lights, a hanging 4-bulb light 8 feet away in the “breakfast nook”, and a few recently discovered battery powered lights under the upper cabinets, kitchen lighting feels like it might have been something of an obsession.

The obsession isn’t quite as bad elsewhere in the house, but by my last count I currently need to stock up to 8 different styles and wattages of bulb. Not including anything on the outside. I managed with no more the four different types of bulb (including the outside) in Memphis and knocked that down to three types in the rental. Currently one pantry shelf is pulling permanent duty as my own personal lighting warehouse. That feels vaguely excessive.

Eventually everything is going to get swapped out with LEDs so I can screw stuff in and then forget about it for about a decade, but in the meantime I’ll spend half my time at home swapping out dead bulbs for live ones – and never having the style or size I need.

It’s just one more item on the list of micro-fixes this place needs to fully carry my personalized stamp of approval. If I’ve learned anything during my various trials of home ownership, that list never actually gets any shorter as there’s always “just one more thing” that needs doing.

(Power) Failure…

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When you’re in information worker, the one thing you absolutely need to do your job is electricity. Without that one basic staple of modern life, all the other bits and pieces are pretty much irrelevant. Look around your office and name three productivity tools that you can still use if the power is out. And no, you stapler, hole punch, and tape dispenser don’t count as productivity tools. Computers, printers, email, address book, you name it and without electricity they’re not worth a dime.

Going grid down in the middle of the day only serves to remind me how utterly incapable of doing my job I’d be in a real-world long term power outage. I’m a little more prepared to deal with that kind of eventuality in my personal life, but as far as answering the question “How will you do your job when the lights go out?” I’m mostly left to shrug and wish I’d have thought to stash a deck of playing cards in my desk for just such an eventuality.

We’ve raised an entire generation, myself included, who have no idea how things worked before there was a computer on every desk. If I were a boss, it’s the kind of problem that might keep me up at night. Since I’m most decidedly not a boss, I’ll remember in the future to make sure my Kindle is fully charged before leaving the house in the morning from here on out.

Welcome to the 19th Century…

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As we prepare to celebrate Independence Day, it seems perversely fitting that million of our fellow citizens are sitting, literally, in the dark sweltering in the summer heat illuminated by the contemporary equivalent of candlelight. I mean it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, right? While I like irony as much as the next guy (maybe a little more), this should remind all of us of something we collectively never think about until it’s suddenly not working… The fact that we’re running a 21st century economy on top of 19th century infrastructure.

Overhead distribution lines probably worked well enough when all they were running was a few light bulbs in each house. When nearly every conceivable item in the modern house runs on electricity, though, thin copper cable strung on wooden poles seems like a less than ideal solution to delivering uninterrupted service to nearly every home in the country. If the way we distribute electricity isn’t hardened against falling tree limbs, I think it’s safe to assume that it would fare poorly against an actual person or group of people determined to bring the system down.

It’s probably cost prohibitive to bury every mile of every cable in the country, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give it a hard look in places where it makes sense (i.e. in areas of dense population, areas prone to severe storms, etc.). At some point, the cost of continually repairing outdated infrastructure surpasses the cost of, you know, replacing it with something better. Most people don’t drive the same car their great-grandparents bought in 1916, but we’re using the same distribution model they came up with back then. Infrastructure improvement across the board needs to be a national priority because as more people and new technology put increased demand on outdated utilities, the Great Power Outage of 2012 is probably just a preview of good times to come.

Yep, fixing the problem is going to be expensive, but just wait until your power is out for a week or two and tell me all about the cost of doing nothing.

Detail orientation…

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I spend a lot of time around here calling out people for doing dumb shit. In the interests of full disclosure, I need to make this confession. As it turns out, I’m not always the most detail oriented person in the room. I was reminded of this last night when I went to the basement to install a few A/V components before the Comcast guy came by this weekend with my new cable box. As you might expect, there’s a back story here just waiting to be told.

I was very pleased with myself last weekend because I’d finally managed to rearranged everything in the basement and haul out a truckload of trash and sundry useless crap I’ve moved all over the country. After almost a year of trying to figure out exactly what to do with the 1/3 of the house that’s below grade, I’d managed to set up what would pass for a media room in most 1200 square foot rentals.

It seems I’ve neglected one small, but important detail about setting up a TV, DVR, blueray player, and Apple TV. As it turns out, they all require electricity. Sadly, the wall I’ve decided to build my home media center around is lacking in that one particular feature. Even though the coax is right there poking through the wall, the closest electrical outlet is about 12 feet away… and in another room. Clearly, I’d lost the trees for the forest.

I’m not about to cut into the wall and put in an outlet. This dump is a rental after all. Instead, I ordered the surge protector with the longest power cord I could find (Special thanks to Belkin for the 10 foot cord option). With that, and hopefully some slack in the individual component power cables, I might, just might, be able to rig something up without dragging the orange extension cord in from the shed.

This should be ghetto fabulous. Then again, this is Cecil County so there’s a fair chance no one will notice.

Higher ground…

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With the Mississippi on the way up, I wouldn’t say we’re necessarily abandoning our position in West Tennessee, but we are making preparations for a tactical retrograde to positions on higher ground. If flooding along the Mississippi and its tributaries gets somewhere in the vicinity of the worst case scenario, my office will be at least partially underwater, roads and bridges leading to the base will be impassable, and there’s some disagreement about whether entire swaths of the county could see their power turned off for 1-2 weeks. That last part begs the question, who in their right mind builds the main electrical distribution panel for a city on the wrong side of the levee? Yes, I’m looking at you MLGW.

Looking at the FEMA flood maps, I can’t foresee any circumstances where the house would be in any direct danger from flooding, aside from the possibility of stormdrain and sewer backup – there’s a happy thought. The biggest risk for me seems to be the possibility of multiple days with no electricity. In the grand scheme of bad things than can happen, I know that being without power isn’t even close to the worst of it. However, if you’re a dedicated technophile, being without the juice even for a few hours can be cause for developing nervous tics. A week or more? That’s enough to fill your heart with dread.

Being forewarned, as they say, is being forearmed and plans are being put in place that would give me the opportunity to pull up stakes temporarily until something approaching a civilized level of public services have been restored. Assuming that the word is going to come down making this a reality the real questions then becomes – When and for how long? If it looks like a situation that will last more than a few days, the logical answer is to pack up the truck and head east. Sure, I could get a hotel alot closer, but the thought of spending an indeterminate amount of time in a hotel room with two 80 pound dogs doesn’t seem ideal. Then again, leaving the house undefended in a city like Memphis, with no electricity (and therefore no alarm), and hoping it hasn’t been looted and pillaged while I’ve been away doesn’t sound appealing either. For some reason, I don’t think the fine citizens of Memphis would respond to natural disaster any better than those of New Orleans did.

I plan to stay in place as long as I have two things: electricity and an open escape route to the east. When either one of those things seem to be in danger of going away, then I’ll be in the wind and headed for high ground.