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Imagine this scenario:
A random household discovers during the middle of a winter storm that their generator doesn't work. They brave a dark and cold night at home, trying to keep from having to open doors or otherwise break air seals, and then trundle up to Home Depot the next morning to buy another generator. That generator gets plugged in and the house starts to warm back up, with a single room actually electrified so that cell phone chargers and laptops can be plugged in. Then, in a sudden twist of events, the newly-purchased generator stops working after a mere 8 hours. An attempt is made to borrow yet another generator from a friend whose power has been restored, but it turns out that they have a different type of connector on their generator and the household can't make use of it, so they are forced to decide between passing another cold and dark night at home or buggering off to somewhere warm (they decide to stay, partly because by the time the final problem is realized it's late enough to just go to bed, and partly out of a desire to be able to minimize the damage should yet another crisis occur, like perhaps the pipes freezing.)
If this were a movie, you'd deride it for being unbelievable. Oh, sure, it'd be a comedy so maybe there would be some decent writing to salvage it, but at the end of the day you'd say "No one is that unlucky."
But this is not a movie. This is the most recent 45 hours of my life. And John's life. And CJ's life. And Chris and Marina and Jacob's life. (Poor Jake just wanted to go home, but the roads were too terrible to get him back to his father's house in Berkley.)
The brand-new generator has been returned to Home Depot, who gave us a new one. The new one had just been brought up and plugged in when I was leaving, but since John hasn't called to say that we're boned yet again, I presume that it's working and the house is once again heating. (It better be. It was 48 degrees in our bedroom this morning, and colder still downstairs. I wasn't kidding about pipe-freezing worries.) I'm currently at Jeff's, running some laundry so that I can have clean underwear. Then I plan to take a shower, because my hair takes 3 hours to dry naturally, and a hair dryer would likely trip the circuit breakers at the house. I can live with 3 hours of wet hair in a warm house, but not if the temperature is in the 50s.
In the meantime, DTE has seen fit to finally come out to the house... to run some CAUTION tape down the property next to the downed wire. And then apparently left, because there is no sign of any of their trucks, and the wire is still down.
A random household discovers during the middle of a winter storm that their generator doesn't work. They brave a dark and cold night at home, trying to keep from having to open doors or otherwise break air seals, and then trundle up to Home Depot the next morning to buy another generator. That generator gets plugged in and the house starts to warm back up, with a single room actually electrified so that cell phone chargers and laptops can be plugged in. Then, in a sudden twist of events, the newly-purchased generator stops working after a mere 8 hours. An attempt is made to borrow yet another generator from a friend whose power has been restored, but it turns out that they have a different type of connector on their generator and the household can't make use of it, so they are forced to decide between passing another cold and dark night at home or buggering off to somewhere warm (they decide to stay, partly because by the time the final problem is realized it's late enough to just go to bed, and partly out of a desire to be able to minimize the damage should yet another crisis occur, like perhaps the pipes freezing.)
If this were a movie, you'd deride it for being unbelievable. Oh, sure, it'd be a comedy so maybe there would be some decent writing to salvage it, but at the end of the day you'd say "No one is that unlucky."
But this is not a movie. This is the most recent 45 hours of my life. And John's life. And CJ's life. And Chris and Marina and Jacob's life. (Poor Jake just wanted to go home, but the roads were too terrible to get him back to his father's house in Berkley.)
The brand-new generator has been returned to Home Depot, who gave us a new one. The new one had just been brought up and plugged in when I was leaving, but since John hasn't called to say that we're boned yet again, I presume that it's working and the house is once again heating. (It better be. It was 48 degrees in our bedroom this morning, and colder still downstairs. I wasn't kidding about pipe-freezing worries.) I'm currently at Jeff's, running some laundry so that I can have clean underwear. Then I plan to take a shower, because my hair takes 3 hours to dry naturally, and a hair dryer would likely trip the circuit breakers at the house. I can live with 3 hours of wet hair in a warm house, but not if the temperature is in the 50s.
In the meantime, DTE has seen fit to finally come out to the house... to run some CAUTION tape down the property next to the downed wire. And then apparently left, because there is no sign of any of their trucks, and the wire is still down.
