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The building I had planned to work in today had problems with its air conditioning so I elected to work in my home office. About an hour into my day, my air conditioner suddenly shut down along with all the power in the house.
I glanced outside to see the hydro lines bouncing and a construction crew scurrying about. Once the excitement was over they went back about their work. Using my keen problem management skills I ascertained that the root cause of my power outage was a line shorted by something hitting the power lines, and picked up the phone to report it.
That's when it dawned on me that the portable phones that we have require electricity to work. Fortunately I had cell phone coverage.
But wait, it gets better!
I called the utility company's automated attendant pressed one for this, two for that, and eventually my outage was recorded. I then received a message that if I had further information that would help them troubleshoot this incident, to stay on the line and speak with an attendant.
In mere moments an attendant responded and asked me the nature of my call, recorded all the same information that I had just entered, and then seemed uninterested in the vital information that I was able to provide on why the outage occurred so that they would be able to resolve the incident more quickly.
Only somewhat satisfied that I had done all I could do, I returned to work on my battery powered laptop computer, only to be interrupted by the house phone ringing somewhere off in the distance. Dashing from floor to floor, I discovered our only non-portable phone in the house that I had forgotten that we still had. On the other end of the line was a helpful person from the field service group informing me that there was a power outage on my street (big news). He said they had no idea why, and would be dispatching a crew. He speculated that that some animal must have crawled inside the distribution box.
I've had it! I'm packing up and finding a third location to work from today. I sure hope they have coffee, air conditioning and efficient process for service delivery...
