Lights Out

11:44 p.m. last night:

I’ve lived in my apartment complex for three years now. Thirty-six months. For almost 35 of those months, I lived without experiencing any power outages, in fact, nary even a flicker. Suddenly, in the past four or six weeks, it seems that power flickers and outages are becoming a weekly occurrence. At the beginning of August, as I already wrote here, it went out in the middle of the night, taking my alarm clock with it and resulting in my oversleeping a race I’d volunteered to help with. Either right before or right after that, it was out for a half hour or so in the middle of the afternoon, but that was during a thunderstorm so I wrote it off.

But just now it went off and has been off for going on 20 minutes. Now, I know 20 minutes is not exactly a long time (in 6th grade, when Hurricane Hugo came through Charlotte, my family and I went for two weeks without lights in the house), but I can’t help but wonder what the hell is going on! It’s clear outside. No storms. Nothing special, and nothing unusual, except that I was happily sitting at my computer editing a photo until WHAM! Darkness. Fortunately my laptop stayed on and illuminated the room so I didn’t crash into something trying to find my flashlight and light some candles.

I walked down to the parking lot, and every building in my field of view was dark, with some flashlights moving in the windows. So I called Reliant Energy. I called five minutes ago. I’m still on hold. At 11:46 at night.

What gives, Reliant Energy?? Why has my power suddenly become less reliable, Reliant? Nice company name there. Love it. I set my battery alarm and am about to go to bed. When the power comes back on though, I’ll wake up, because all my electronics will start whirring again.

I can deal with not being able to finish my photos or watch the end of the Astros game. I can even deal with being on hold at 11:50 at night. But if my power doesn’t come back on soon, it’s going to get HOT, and that is something I do NOT want to deal with. I just paid, literally just paid tonight prior to the disappearing electricity, a $105 electricity bill and they canÃ’t keep my air conditioning running.

I’m moving back to San Francisco.

The end of the story is that I went to bed at midnight and half an hour later everything came back on and scared the crap out of me, jolting me awake.