POW ! And make that a double.

My aging (who isn’t?) dog couldn’t get up off my bedroom floor at about 3 a.m. this morning. Her struggles and repeated thud noises woke me and I sprang out of bed to help her.  This has happened to her before and each time she gets understandably scared.  So do I.  She’s a big girl and I need to position myself just right over her and slide my arms under her pelvic area in order to raise her up and enable her rear section to regain control so she can stand and walk. We had accomplished this and I had crawled back between my satin sheets (the one luxury I give myself is satin).  I had just gotten myself cozy and then ...

POW!  There is more than one reason it is called a “Pow”er outage.  One terrific Pow explosion accompanying the huge brilliant orange visual lit up the fog and drizzle-filled sky at 3:14 a.m. in front of my house today.  It was the friendly transformer on the utility pole outside the front window of my bedroom.  It was too bleary and weary to be happening; yet, there it was, unspectacularly quiet now ... a deceased or deep coma transformer.  I dreaded the next part. I knew I had to call KUB’s emergency and outage phone line.  

Sure enough, the gregarious female robotic voice told me to punch in either my account # (all my paid utility bills are filed in the file cabinet and it is very, very dark to find them in my house at the moment) or the phone # associated with the account (OK, that is do-able so I did that).  She also mentioned that I could go online and view my options. !  Well, sure, I have no electricity so she thinks I should try to turn the computer on and access my Internet connection!   Finally, she gave me a phone option I can use if I have information that might help the repair crew.  So I punched in my phone number again so the repairman  could call me for this valuable information. The only hitch to that is that now my phone is showing it would like to be charged and I’m not sure he will be able to reach me if the phone doesn’t get plugged into some electricity to be charged soon.  When the repairman called, he listened to my description of the transformer’s demise and assured me he will send a crew out.  And he did ... I saw their truck slowly drive by and look up at the transformer and then drive away into the fog.  As the hours drifted by (the hours were drifting ... but I was feebly moving from the bed to the couch to the window, many times), and approached 7 a.m., I put together a plan: At 8 a.m. I would drive myself to my friend Dr. G’s office and ask him if he will let me charge my cell phone there, then I will carry my Tetley tea bag into a fast-food place and ask them to serve it to me in some nice hot water. Once I had that plan in my mind and set to work, I got dressed and walked toward the door.

Well, to my utter delight and relief, and with a sincerely spoken sentiment of gratitude to my Higher Power, I saw – coming down my little street -- a convoy of KUB vehicles.  First was the big POWerful looking one with a myriad of flashing orange lights and other stuff, then the one that has that lifting and contorting ladder that climbs way up, up, up!  The last vehicle was the "traffic control” truck that positions itself between the repair crews and cars that are passing by. Twice, during the repair scenario I walked out there to reassure myself that the crew was really there and to watch with fascination as a brave man went up in the bucket and was doing things to wet wires.  When he came down, another man told me the POWer should be back up in about ten minutes.  A while later, my appliances began their little noises to let me know they were beginning to feed on the electricity ... but all too quickly (maybe ten seconds) I heard another POW!  It was a transformer up the street on the other end of the utility line.  "Oh no!  I’m heading to Dr. G’s right now".

But ... on my way out the door (if this is a movie, add some symphonic music here), I saw the trucks returning to “my” transformer and so naturally I went out to see if mine was the offending one.  A couple of the crew members said that they are going over the work they did on the other end to see what they might have missed.  Sure enough, at around 8 a.m., I heard the welcomed beeps and hums of my heaters, furnace, internet modem, and all those awesome things we take for granted.  I felt ecstatic.  And dear Dr. G. didn’t need to charge my phone and I didn’t have to wave a tea bag at a fast-food place.  So ... it was time for me to eat, walk my dog, and slide back into my satin sheets ... and I did!

Accolades for the KUB crews!  While KUB needs to program its telephone robot with nicer procedural skills to help customers during outages, the wonderful, beautiful guys -- heroes who ride in with KUB's awesome repair vehicles -- cannot be praised enough.  These men even laugh and sing while they ride up into the air and re-wire (or whatever they were doing to) frazzled transformers.  More than that, they speak pleasantly with homeowners who, not at their best between 4 and 7 a.m., emerge from their front doors and meander across lawns in robes and floppy slippers to watch the repair – sort of  like cheerleaders who want their heroes to win the game with the clever and wily wires.