kahunaburger

At precisely 9:15am this morning power to my home was cut. I was still out, dropping off Pia at school and when I returned and tried to open the garage door, it would just stare blankly at me and not cooperate. Initially I thought the battery in the garage-door-opener had died, but when I entered the house through the front door I knew immediately that I had a bigger problem: there’s usually a low-frequency “humm” in my home from all the 24/7 devices and it was eerily quiet in my home after I opened the door. Oh, great – power was out again. I have to admit that I had a lot less problems here in the “La Vida” subdivision compared to the way more frequent outages in Tesuque, but still, it sucks every time it happens.
Called PNM at 10am to report the outage and I’m surprised to hear that I’m the first one who reports an outage for the “La Vida” subdivision. The lady on the phone does not have a clue what’s going on and can’t provide an estimate on when power would be restored. Luckily the iPhone is fully charged and I can read/write emails while the power is out.
I take the car to one of the neighbours homes across the street and find out that they still have power. I drive back to the “Aldea” subdivision where I saw some PNM-trucks on my way home. They claim that I’m on a different circuit and that their work does not have anything to do with my outage.

It takes two more calls into PNM (at 1-hr intervals) to finally get the power restored (at 12:20pm). Three hours!!! What is this? A third-world country? In all those years that I lived in Amsterdam and Munich, I don’t recall having power outages that lasted more than a few mins. Same at my parent’s place in Aichach, which is a tenth of the size of Santa Fe.

The electrical grid in the US scares the sh*t out of me. Every time I visited New York, I was wondering how that city was still operating: it just seems like a giant patchwork that’s held together by duct-tape and super-glue. If I was a terrorist I would have a pretty good idea on how to make things come to a standstill here: just remove one of the duct-tapes …