Open Letter to National Grid

Dear Assholes:

Okay, so I'm upstairs, typing away, doing the things I do to the pay the rent (which typically has nothing to do with typing but James Thurber once said the hardest thing about his job was convincing his wife that staring out the window was an important part of it).  What I guess I'm saying is that there is a lot of stuff that seems meaningless in one's life, but which, particularly if you are engaged in what one might, in quotations, term "creative" work, is actually important.  This fucking blog jumps to mind, doesn't it?

On a more prosaic note, I'm also reminded of eating my eggs at Carmen's last Saturday.  Halfway through egg B, the solution to the structural problem I'd been wrestling with in a short story hit me on the side of the head like a sledge hammer in the form of the first paragraph, word for word, arriving in my brain.  With nothing available to write it down -- it's hard enough getting coffee at Carmen's; just try getting a sheet of paper and a pencil -- I picked myself off the floor, so to speak, ate the egg, paid the check and hauled ass home.  Ten hours of typing later, the short story was finished, intact, needing only a shitload of editing to make it whole.

So anyway, back to earlier today:

I'm typing away.  Ever since I bought a new, L-shaped desk, I can look past my computer screen out the window down onto Madison Street.  Which sometimes creates backlighting-related problems in viewing my screen, but that's not the point.

The point is that there are two big National Grid trucks out front, working in those bucket things, etc.  I pay them no real mind until all the electricity in the house goes off.  Including my computer, obviously.  Sending whatever it was that I was working on off into the ether instead of down onto my hard drive.  Which was annoying.

I walk outside, spy the National Grid guy standing in the street, and say "All the electricity just went off in my house."

He nods like this is not news to him.

"How long is it gonna be off?"
"Probably about fifteen minutes."

Not really in the mood to get into it with him, I come back inside, wait for the juice to come back on, reboot my computer and write this letter.

What would it have taken for the guy to knock on the door and tell me the electricity was going to be off from X to Y hours?  It would have saved me a lot of aggravation.  Likely my neighbors too.

You know, most people don't like utility companies.  This is one of the reasons why.

Yours, annoyed,

Geoffrey Raymond