Power Restored

After the accident last week that took out our electricity at the office, the push was on to get it restored. This may seem easy - this is America, after all - and I guess compared to some third world countries, it was easy. But for this American's I-Deserve-A-Break-Today plus Less-Than-A-Minute-Through-The-Drivethrough mindset, it seemed harder than it should.

The first issue was finding the right parts to repair the box. The Mister explained clearly to me that the force of the car knocking over the electrical box by the fence was so strong that it actually pulled the wires off the box hooked to the office. These wires are underground (in a pipe, of course) and travel about 60 feet from the impact to the office where the damage occurred. SRP's emergency crew came out that very night and worked to repair the electrical box by the fence, but the box on the office was still damaged, and therefore we still had no power. The parts for this damage were unavailable and very costly even if you could find them, which looked to be about 10 days out, from initial estimates. Ten more days of being unable to work! It was depressing.

Thankfully, our electrician found the parts after a diligent search, and made the repairs on Friday. There was excitement all around. We just needed it to be inspected and then we could be "energized" - the power turned on again. But there was some confusion about who needed to do the inspection and who needed to "green tag" it, since it is a private box, not the one next to the road that SRP maintains, and so now there was some phoning between various officials and The Mister in the middle, and as the day dragged on, it became obvious that there would be no electricity on Friday. Hopes dashed.

Yesterday, however, everything was cleared up; it was inspected, green-tagged, and energized, and by noon power was restored. Now we can pick up where we left off a week ago. There's a lot of work to catch up on, and thankfully, we're eager to do that.