No Lights, Camera, Action!

When I was in high school, we had a “blizzard.” Due to the power company being lazy with their trimming for many years, this one ice storm knocked down a ton of trees and limbs, which took down a ton of power lines all over a multi-county area. Hundreds of households had no power, my road included. Most folks got power back within a few days. The power company worked steadily, getting the lines back up.

We were understanding that it’d take a few days to get the mess sorted at first. We knew our rural-ish area wasn’t going to have power restored immediately with so many folks without power. It wasn’t our first big power outage. We could be patient.

A week later, the power company was all over the news, bragging about how they’d finished power restoration to the area. Everyone had power again!

Except us.

My road was still powerless. The entire road had no power. Everyone around us had power. But us? Still freezing our tails off in the dark with no running water. Calls to the power company, telling them we still didn’t have power, got no results. “Our system shows you have power.” No convincing them that we did not, in fact, have power. Their system said we did, and that was the only thing they listened to.

The neighborhood decided to take action. Neighbors called the local news station and set up an interview time to address our problem. Mom was ‘volentold’ that she was going to give the interview. (In fairness, Mom was the best choice due to her public speaking experience.) The local station sent their crew out to interview Mom about how we didn’t have power, hadn’t had power in over a week, and the power company refused to send anyone to fix it.

The story aired first thing with the six o’clock news.

There were five power company trucks parked at the church at the entrance to our road by half past six.

Our power was back on before seven. Turns out they’d fixed the physical lines, but someone forgot to flip a switch at the church to turn on the power to our road. (It’d been turned off while they were working for obvious safety reasons.)

Amazing how fast that power company got off its tail to restore power when they were being publicly shamed on the big local news station.