PG&E showed up this morning just as I was getting ready to back the car out to go to the lab to have some blood drawn (for a routine physical — don’t panic, Mom!). Fortunately, I make a habit of looking in my rear-view mirror before giving the car any gas, even when I’m only backing out of my garage, and therefore I saw the guy instead of finding him with my bumper.
He went to the backyard, and I heard him say “Aha! I bet that’s the problem!”, so I went out and asked what was going on. He said that the wires from the pole to the house didn’t look right, and that the meter wasn’t sealed (which is definitely a no-no!). He also said he’d fix the problem, so I left for work.
When I got home, there were two messages from him on the answering machine. One told me that he’d found a loose connection on the neutral wire at the weatherhead and fixed it; the other gave me his cellphone number in case we had further problems. I consider that to be good service and will tell PG&E so.
I nearly called him to find out just what a weatherhead was, but a quick Google query led to enlightenment.
So then I went to Unilab. They opened at 8, and since this was a fasting blood test, I wanted to get there as early as possible and go have breakfast — my encounter with PG&E slowed me up, but it seemed like a worthwhile delay. But I was ready. Too bad they weren’t; when I got there at 8:25, they were still processing patients who’d been there promptly at 8. At one point, the receptionist/phlebotomist (an unusual combination of jobs) asked one of the other patients if she was fasting — the answer was a rather edgy “yes!” (I guess she wanted her breakfast, too!).
It seemed as though one patient was the cause of most of the delay, because the line started moving fairly quickly; I was called, and just as I sat down in the chair, my cellphone rang. Since almost no one has the number, I thought it might be important and took it out; sure enough, it was Shir Hadash calling. So I answered it.
It was the office manager, calling for advice; Norton AntiVirus had popped up an alert on the Rabbi’s computer. I wasn’t exactly in the best position to deal with the problem right then, so I told her I’d call back soon. But the call wasn’t totally unwelcome — the phlebotomist drew her sample while I was on the phone, and I never even noticed!
The day improved from there; I had a nice breakfast (blueberry pancakes) and earned some miles in the process, and when I talked with Shir Hadash, I found out that the problem was not serious: Norton AntiVirus had triggered when it detected a piece of e-mail which had been infected with Klez, and so there was no real infection or problem.
I won’t be able to tell if our power problem is really fixed or not until we need to turn on the lights and see if they still flicker. The PG&E troubleman did say that the transformer serving our area was pretty old and had been sized for the loads prevailing many years ago, before most of the neighborhood added hot tubs, air conditioning, and the like, so it might still be a trouble spot. We’ll see.