The power company has finally fixed the problem. Slobo called during the day on Monday to the head supervisor at our Electric CoOp company, expressing how frustrated he was becoming with the power brownouts! If you aren’t familiar, it’s been happening for over a month between 12:00-1 AM and 8 AM. They were so frequent and strong on Sunday night that it rebooted our computers every 20-30 minutes. That night alone we had over a 115 brownouts in a two hour period. He was so frustrated that he got in his car and drove up to the mainroad to follow how many miles down the street everyone else’s porch lights and such were flickering. Between 5 and 8 the power finally just died.

The Co-Op has made excuse after excuse. They kept saying it was just us and our neighbor who were on the same box. Either our neighbor had an AC unit about to freeze up or were doing something illegal in their basement, etc. Then, when the neighbor joined us in the complaints and we started watching the neighborhood, we found everyone on our power grid was having the same problem.

Monday AM, Slobo’s co-worker, an engineer, mentioned that they were probably giving the larger cities part of their power at night since it was a regular occurrence. So, Slobo called the supervisor at the Co-Op to ask if that was what was going on. “Certainly not sir, we wouldn’t be selling so much power to cause that….. ” Slobo mentioned his frustration and how he was going to speak to an attorney if it wasn’t fixed soon. He told him how we had already lost one battery backup because of the constant brownout state and was on the verge of losing something even more expensive. How he was working from home at night and couldn’t get his work done.

Lo and Behold, the power problem was corrected. Monday night, no brownout and now, Wedsneday, brownout free still. Amazing how a threat works. And to add salt – they had the power guy stop buy ringing our doorbell at 5am Tuesday morning, waking up the kids, to tell us the problem was that lightning had taken out one of the circuits and since lightning issues meant they did not have to pay for damages, he would not be able to collect on the lost UPS. Wasn’t that nice?

At least he didn’t lose any of his Dell Memory in the new computer as easily as the Electric Co-Op has lost theirs!