The Bleeding Edge of Reality

Oh yeah!! I tend to give them plenty of flack for unstable power, but I just had an experience last night that changes my outlook on PGE and their customer service levels!

To keep it short, it’s been raining and storming heavily in Portland Oregon for the past few days here. On Monday I we had a power outage that affected 8500+ folks, for about 3 hours during the day. Ever since power was restored, it’s been very flaky with major dips and spikes, the lights dimming and pulsing, my plasma tv shutting down, etc. Figured it’s something PGE knew about and would fix.

Well, Tuesday is HarmFamily rehearsal night (one of ‘em anyhow), and the power was still very sketchy. I powered up my rack and the power conditioner indicated I was getting about 95v where it should be 110v. Everything sounded tinny and thin as my Marshall was starving for power. I told my wife to call PGE and that they need to get this resolved. This was about 7pm on Tuesday evening. We continued rehearsal and at about 8pm opened the garage door to take a short break. Up pulls a utility truck, out gets a PGE repair man and asks “what’s the problem?” I am in disbelief!!!! I invite him into the garage and explain the dips and surges, indicating that nothing is causing it (like turning on the microwave or som’n) and show him my line voltage reading on my power conditioner. He is very cool, asks where the power meter is and I show him. A few minutes later he points out that the turnbuckle that secures the cabling which stabilizes the main power line has snapped and the line is sagging about 15 ft lower than it usually would. He gets into the cherry picker and fixes the problem!!! 45 minutes later, my power is perfect!!

I thanked him many times and he asked “What sort of music do you guys play?” I told him HarmFamily is a metal band and we play the larger clubs in Portland. He says “Ah, I’m probably too old…” to which I said “you’re NEVER too old!!”. He immediately warmed up and told me about how he saw Hendrix, Joplin, Canned Heat, etc in his day. I told him I love that music as well and gave him one of our CDs! He seemed pretty excited.

Anyhow, hats off to PGE and their customer service, especially the guy that showed up last night. Very cool, incredible response time, and everything that customer service should be!!! Way to go PGE!!!

Well, here we are in 2006, another election year and another battery of measures to vote on, though I’m not going to rant about that, because here in Oregon, the most important issue right now is the overwhelming amount of IDIOTS who can’t drive IN THE RAIN!! Seriously, you’d think here in Portland it was raining WD-40 with shards of glass and roofing nails.

In a 30 minute span (which usually takes 10 minutes) driving to work, in one day, today, I’ve seen two wrecks, countless soccer moms and blue-hairs driving 20mph in the left lane, as if they were “helping” by slowing down to 20mph UNDER the speed limit. Leave a bit of extra room between you and the next vehicle doesn’t NOT equate logically to “imagine the Grand Canyon, now triple the widest point and make that your guideline for following others”. What happens is you leave enough room for the 19 year old with the Honda Whatever, complete with Folgers Exhaust System, to race into that space, causing Soccer Mom to hammer the brakes, chain reaction ensues, and now the whole fucking road is hammering their brakes.

There should be tests for all to be able to legally drive in the rain. If it’s THAT fucking hard and so stressful that common sense becomes a ball and chain, TAKE THE BUS YOU A-HOLE AND GET THAT POS OFF THE FUCKING ROAD BEFORE YOU KILL SOMEONE!!!