A month of psychological terror has come to an end. No longer will I wonder if tonight is the night HydroOne, the gawdforsaken travesty of an electrical monopoly will suddenly, and without adequate warning, turn my power off, leaving me without light and warmth. All so Molson's, the brew king, can haul their gigantic overseas-made vats past my backyard while travelling from Hamilton to Etobicoke.
I knew it was going to happen 'early' last night because yesterday morning, the procession of the trucks hauling the vats was parked four blocks away at the corner of Bramalea and Steeles. Having a doctor's appointment in the morning, I went and did a drive-by to see them. Big is always a relative term. I'm a short little dude compared to Shaq O'Neal but I tower over the youngest kid next door. So, when I say these vats are BIG, let me try to put it into perspective. I think, on the truck, they might be taller than my two-story house. Each. And I can understand why they needed at least two-lane (both ways) roads to travel on. Got the picture? As I drove back to my house, I looked at the over-head wires on Bramalea and said to myself, "No way they get through here without cutting the power to let them pass." Actually, it was more of a mutter of outrage, but the feeling was one of pessimism.
Somewhere between 8pm and 10 pm, the trucks would come thundering down the incline at the corner they were stopped at and race down Bramalea's straightaway, headed for Queen St. It would come while the Raptors-Pistons game was on. I expected it to happen in the closing minutes, cuz that's what these twits would do. So, I turned off all the electrical equipment I could, especially the UPS's I've attached to many of them. I left just the newest UPS running, because I wanted to test it in a power outage, especially the "silence the alarm" button. (To me, worth exactly 84.6 percent of the purchase price). I sat watching the game and it managed to finish, with a disappointing loss by Toronto. A HA! The lords of power had futzed up. I got the game in, and turned to reading, to await the inevitable screech of the power going out. I had a reading light for the Kindle eReader. I was fully prepared.
Then the phone rang. And rang again. And again. And yet again. Clients with a problem regarding my Point of Sale software. The problem was fixed. Each phone call included the message that if the line went suddenly dead, it wasn't me, it was them, the meisters of power, HydroOne. Then, one final call. I was, to put it mildly, surprised at how popular I was. Furthermore, the content of the phone call was different. "Did your power go out?" I was asked. No. "Then it's not going out. The vats are all the way to Clark Blvd."
The procession had indeed sneaked past my backyard in record time. AND WITHOUT TURNING OFF MY POWER!!!! The stated possibility of an outage of from one to six hours was nothing more than a boogie monster, meant to raise stress levels, repeated, ad nauseum for the last month. The cretin in charge of public information, the guy who delivered a mailing last week that said it would happen in the Monday to Wednesday time frame ... on Tuesday afternoon .... could stop testing my blood pressure. His clumsy, perpetually wrong, threats are no more.
I was prepared for him to be right. That he proved be completely and utterly wrong in just about everything, should have come as a relief. But it bothered me that the power DIDN'T go off last night. It would have been a stress reliever and I would have turned the darkness a deep shade of blue, listing all of the genetic anomalies I'm sure contribute to the bozo's utter lack of ability to do his job.
But in the end, I just turned off the light and went to sleep.
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