PG&E

I Hate My Power Company

Fandango28 Comments

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) is my electric and gas utility company. There was an electrical outage in our area on Sunday morning. Unfortunately, our whole house generator that we bought two years ago for just that purpose crapped out on us, leaving us without electricity and AC for four hours until the power was restored. I wrote about this here in response to Paula Light’s The Monday Peeve prompt.

Today, at 2:30 pm, the electricity went off again. And our generator has not yet been fixed. The good news was that by 4:00 on this very hot day, power was restored.

Can you guess what happened 45 minutes later? Yep, the power went out again. It’s now after 8 pm my time, more than three hours since today’s second outage, and there’s still no word on when we can expect power to come back on.

So three power outages in three days! When did Northern California turn into a third world country that can’t even provide reliable electricity to its residents?

I’m pissed.

SoCS — The Last Call

Fandango12 Comments

Linda G. Hill, the creator of One-Liner Wednesday, JusJoJan, and Stream of Consciousness Saturday, has asked us to “talk about the enterprise (sales or service) conducted by the last phone call you received from a business you’re not associated with, or talk about that phone conversation itself.”

Okay, I’m going to bend the rules a little and instead of relating a phone call I had with a business I’m not associated with, I’m going tell you about a series of text messages I had yesterday with an electrician I hired to swap out the 125 amp main electric panel with a 200 amp main panel in the house we just bought and will be moving into in two weeks.

Upgrading the main electric service to 200 amps is a pretty involved process. I had to get a permit from the town, arrange for the local utility company, PG&E, to disconnect the power to the house, hire an electrician to remove the old panel and install the new one, get the town to inspect and approve the installation of the panel by the electrician, and then get PG&E to come out and turn the electric service back on.

Anyway, at 12:45 yesterday afternoon, I got a text in which the electrician said the work, which he had started on Wednesday, was finished.A6FA501E-35C4-46B6-8C91-E25E560B54EBVia text, he gave me the final fee for his work. I asked him if I could give him my credit card number, but he asked me to Venmo him the money. I told him I’d be back at the house on Monday and could give him a check then, but he said he’d prefer being paid through Venmo.

Maybe I’m old school, but I don’t have a Venmo account. I told him that my bank, Bank of America, offers a similar service, and although I’d never used it, I could set up the transfer of funds to his Venmo account from my the online banking app on my iPhone. I started the process and was ready to initiate the transfer when I got this text message:ED1C913E-CE9D-4D3B-9373-7F85309D9783Well, at least I tried to be a thoroughly modern, technology savvy man.

The Monday Peeve on Tuesday

Fandango10 Comments

PG&E LogoPaula Light, over at Light Motifs II, has this weekly thing she calls The Monday Peeve. She says that it’s “a chance to blow off a little steam at the beginning of the week, so then we can go merrily on our way once again.”

Well, I know it’s Tuesday, but I have some steam I need to blow off, and it’s directed at my utility company, Pacific Gas & Electric, or PG&E.

Now in the grand scheme of things, I don’t have that much to complain about. The power company officials started notifying 200,000 customer accounts across 16 counties yesterday that their power may be preemptively shut off in the middle of the week, as they monitor dangerous weather conditions (e.g., dry conditions coupled with high winds). And this is just two weeks after an unprecedented series of intentional blackouts that left 2 million people across the state without power.

But that’s not my peeve with PG&E, since I was not one of the 2 million or will be one of the 200,000.

My complaint is that I’ve been notified that my electricity will be temporarily interrupted this Thursday night from 9 pm through 6 am Friday morning in order to “safely replace an electric power pole” on my block.

So what’s the big deal, you ask? A nine hour outage mostly when I’m sleeping. Oh boo hoo. Such an inconvenience. Stop whining, Fandango. Right?

Well, here’s why I’m pissed. This “repair” was originally scheduled for mid-July. I got the notice in the mail and prepared for the outage. I froze two water-filled, 2-liter soda bottles in my freezer and put them in my refrigerator overnight so that my food wouldn’t spoil. I bought a small, battery operated lantern, some flashlights, and a bunch of candles at the hardware store, and I explained to my cat and dog what was going to happen so that they wouldn’t freak out.

But the blackout never occurred. No explanation from PG&E. Nothing. I figured that they must have repaired or replaced whatever they needed to repair or replace and the power to my house was spared. Oh happy day.

But then I received another letter from PG&E earlier this month saying that the work that didn’t happen in July was rescheduled to October 13th starting at 9 pm. Fine. I froze two more 2-liter bottles of soda and put them in the refrigerator and brought out my previously purchased lantern, flashlights, and candles. And this time, I warned my out-of-town houseguests to make sure all of their devices were fully charged before they went to bed that night.

Guess what. Nothing happened. Again. No power outage. No explanation. Until this past Saturday, when I got another letter in the mail from PG&E telling me that the work is now scheduled for this Thursday night/Friday morning. So here we go again.

Maybe the third time will be a charm.Monday Peeve