Tag Archives: utilities

Ice, gas, and appreciation…

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Early last week there was rumbling of an impending ice storm. Having been seasoned by 21 winters in Western Maryland, most versions of frozen precipitation don’t phase me. I mean if I have the option, I don’t want to drive around in any of it, but with snow or sleet, you’d need to see some pretty biblical amounts before I’d be concerned about not being able to get the Jeep through it if I absolutely needed to leave the house for some reason.

Freezing rain, in my estimation, has always been something of a different animal. Good 4-wheel drive and all the torque in the world might let you get going, but with one little slip it’s hard to tell exactly where you might end up. 

Fortunately, my schedule last week called for me to mostly be home, so driving around in anything wasn’t going to be an issue. The catch for me was the propane tank buried in the back yard being only just a hair north of 25% full. Under most circumstances that wouldn’t be low enough to worry about. 100 gallons is plenty to run the furnace and water heater for a good long while. 

What it isn’t enough to do, however, is keep the generator running for more than a day without manually powering it on and off to conserve fuel. The whole point of putting the genny in was to avoid needing to do that sort of thing during a power failure. I want the heat on. I want George’s sun lamps on. I want the well and sump pumps running. I want light in every room. What I told the guy who calculated the size generator I needed was that I wanted to be able to still host Thanksgiving dinner even Delmarva Power suddenly went out of business. 

All the utility cables in my neighborhood are underground. It means we don’t get too many local outages. The outages we do get, though, tend to be because the larger transmission lines stretching through wood and dale have somehow gotten smacked. When they go down, they tend to stay down for half a day or longer.

All of the long power outages I’ve experienced since moving in here have been the result of freezing rain. Since it looked like there was a good chance we’d be getting iced over, I called my propane delivery company hoping they could pull me ahead on the delivery schedule. Sure enough, the next day Tri-Gas and Oil backed up the driveway and pumped off 300 more gallons for me. The ice ended up bypassing us here at Fortress Jeff, but it’s a decided comfort knowing that our local run time is now measured in days rather than in hours.

As much as my teeth grind when it comes time to pay the fuel bill, it’s hard to be too mad at a company that makes an effort to come when you call rather than making excuses about why it’s too hard to do. I appreciate the hell out of them for that.

Personal power…

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I’m sure I say this early every summer, when the Mid-Atlantic is thrashed by heavy rain, high winds, but my god do I love my generator. The lights go out, I count to ten or maybe twelve, and everything turns back on. It’s the briefest possible interruption short of devising a truly uninterruptible power supply for the entire house.

Being able to power everything from lights, pumps, furnace, AC, stove, clothes dryer, sun lamps, and every other bit of electronics in the house almost simultaneously, there’s no question the thing is oversized for what I really “need.” If pressed, I might have to pick two between running the air conditioning flat out, cooking a full dinner, and doing laundry. I’m sure I could have made due with something smaller or more efficient, but given the difference in price point, picking limited circuits instead of running it all felt like a bad trade off. The freedom to not have to pick is, in a word, delightful in that it lets you just get on with the day instead of adding additional layers of complication.

Scratching together the cash to get it installed when I was house poor was a bugger. The thing’s got a bit of a never-ending logistics tail in demanding regular maintenance. But in a week where trees kept falling across the power lines here in Elk Neck, I was reminded at least three times that peace of mind and a steady supply of electricity has been worth every penny.

Good as they may be at getting issues resolved relatively quickly, at this point I think I’d be hard pressed to go back to living solely at the mercy of the power company’s service restoration timetables.

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.

(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.

Rent me…

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One of the really problematic bits of no career being able to keep my attention for more than two or three years is the resulting tendency towards collecting former addresses. As part of my collection, two of these addresses are more than just memories since I’m still nominally responsible for their care, maintenance, and upkeep. I wish I could tell you that being a small time land baron is a profitable endeavor, but as anyone who’s ever done it will probably confirm, most years you’re lucky if you break even.

Which is what leads to posts like this one…

You see, I’m currently in the position of having an unoccupied one bedroom, one bath condo available for rent in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. It’s a 800 square foot, ground level walkout unit featuring a wide covered patio area and a walk in closet/pantry for all you extra storage needs. Your $850 monthly rent includes water, sewer, and trash pick up. With an additional deposit, this unit is both cat and dog friendly.

Centrally located in the Wildewood community, this condo offers easy access to the Patuxent River Naval Air Station, Solomons Island, Leonardtown and all the natural beauty of St. Mary’s County. Our Nation’s capital is within reach if you’re a power commuter. You’re within walking distance of groceries and a less than five minute drive from BJs, Target, and other shopping amenities. Better still, you’ll have ready access to the exciting southern Maryland nightlight offered at the Brass Rail, the Green Door, and Solomons’ historic Tiki Bar.

This opportunity won’t last forever, so act now before it passed you by and someone else is living the life you want in the condo you deserve.

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.

Not-so-Best Buy…

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It feels good to get back to the basic reason I started keeping this blog… Bitching and complaining about the stupid people and things that cross my path in the course of everyday life. Every so often it’s good to come back to your roots. 😉

Before heading back to Maryland for Christmas, I made a point of doing the vast majority of my major purchases ahead of time. I ordered blinds, new living room furniture, and a refrigerator, washer and dryer. Now, being a good steward of my own money, I did my due diligence by checking prices both locally and online. The best price on the washer, dryer, and refrigerator was actually from Best Buy. Good prices and points on my rewards card… Sweet.

I knew I would be in the house by this weekend and scheduled my delivery for today. I should have been prepared for a problem when I called the store yesterday to confirm the delivery time… I called the delivery department. There was no answer. I called the store’s main phone number. There was no answer. I waited an hour, repeated the process, and got the same result… and infuriating ring… ring… ring. By this point it was early evening and I needed to go out to get something for dinner, so I thought I would stop by the store to get an answer and critique their customer service. After waiting for 15 minutes for the customer service desk to actually find the manager, I explained the situation and the information I required. In response to my comment about not being able to reach anyone by phone, she mentioned that “oh, during the holidays, we don’t even bother answering the phone.” I’m fairly sure one of their forklifts could have driven into my mouth at that point. Did the store manager actually just say that they don’t answer their customer service line? Yes. Yes she did. Even if this were true, I think I would have come up with a better excuse.

And so, we come to this morning, with delivery scheduled between 8:00 and 11:00. The time is now 11:38 and I just got a call from the delivery driver. Apparently my street doesn’t exist and because he spent so much time driving around looking for it, he’ll have to move on to the next delivery and try to get me in later in the day. What the fuck?

Honest to God, I can’t believe anyone actually does business this way. If I don’t have a refrigerator, washer, and dryer sitting in this house by about 4:00, I’m cancelling the order and going to Home Depot.