Four Outages, No Kidding!

My house managed to make it three whole months without a power outage.  Then we had four of them.

At about a quarter past eleven last night, during a rainfall that had no embedded thunderstorms or strong winds, the electricity suddenly went out - ironically, while I was winding and resetting our mantel clock.  Right in the middle of a scan of our personal computer.  When it came back on a moment later, I was relieved, and I went to make sure the PC was still all right.  Then the electricity went out again - this time for longer than a moment. 

This second outage lasted forty-five minutes, and I had to report it to my electric company with my cell phone (the landline was out too).  When the power came back on at midnight, I was relieved, but the relief, as is so often when a power outage screws everything up, was short-lived.

The digital converter on my old analog TV set was blinking and not sending a signal.  I called the cable company, and the automated voice told me to reset my modem.  I was not prepared to do that - every other cable-dependent appliance in the house worked fine, and I wasn't going to disturb the modem for one analog TV set that's twenty-odd years old.  I asked for a human being instead, and he sent a signal that restored the set's digital converter without resetting the modem.  That was a relief.

Until he told me he was going to reset the modem anyway.  The technician told me that he detected a slow Internet signal.  I'd already turned on the PC to give it a quick scan, not to go on the Internet (go on the Internet at half past midnight on a Monday going into Tuesday??)  I checked the Internet and it worked fine, and I told him so . . . except that he'd already sent the signal to reset the modem and shut down my Internet and phone service - disconnecting our call - for five to ten minutes.  After briefly going online once the modem was back up, I gave the PC a quick scan - something I'd tried to do half an hour earlier - and finally got around to resetting all of the digital clocks in the house.  

I was so upset and unnerved from all this, I couldn't sleep.  Then the power went out momentarily at 2:52 A.M., and then it went out momentarily at 2:53 A.M.  Four outages in one night.

That's 53 outages of varying duration in all since November 2009.

I'm long past the point where I can't take it any more.  I keep demanding my electric company to fix the problem that's been causing so many outages on my street, most of which were avoidable, and it gives me the runaround over and over and over while doing nothing.  It's obviously caused problems with our cable service, it's made me upset and on edge - every time a thunderstorm passes through, I expect another outage - and it's wearing me out and wearing me down.

I don't know what to do, but I have to do something.  Too many people on my street depend on a steady, reliable supply of power for various reasons.  I'm sure that mine aren't the only frayed nerves on this block.

Fifty-three outages. Fifty-three . . . in a decade . . .. >:-(