Category: default || By jt3y

Regular readers of the Almanac may recall the problems I had with the gas company a few weeks ago.

Well, I arrived home shortly after that Almanac appeared to find a letter in my mailbox from the gas company's customer "service" department, which revealed that they would be replacing the gas mains on our street. This would require digging up our front yards and driveways.

Also, vehicles were not going to be allowed to park on the street.

Also, they were going to have to interrupt the gas service. We would have to be home on the day they did that ... but, of course, they couldn't tell us which day that might be.

Oh, and by the way: If they found any leaks on my side of the shut-off valve, I could expect to have my gas turned off until the line was replaced, though they would gladly install a temporary gas connection at a cost of $200 for 72 hours.

Well, who wants a gas main leak in their neighborhood anyway, right? And it couldn't take too long to replace a gas main on my little street in North Bittyburg. What's a little inconvenience for a few days?

A few days --- ha!

Work started the first week of August. As of Tuesday night, there are still piles of dirt, blinking emergency barricades and construction vehicles all over our street.

At one point, they had piled all of the excavated dirt in a big heap on the street in front of my house. A heavy rainstorm two Saturdays ago turned the entire street into a mudslide. The good news is that the people at the bottom of the hill got an excellent load of free topsoil.

This past Friday night, I arrived home at about 11 o'clock to find that the gas had been shut off at 4:30 p.m. when the new line was connected --- and, of course, since I wasn't home, they didn't turn it back on.

You see, the gas company, like most utilities, operates under the quaint notion that each household has a man, a woman, and 2.5 children. The woman stays home all day, baking bread and scrubbing floors (in pearls and heels) while dad goes off to his office and reads files. At night, they gather around the Philco and listen to Fred Allen.

And during the day, naturally, mom is available to let the gas company man into the house.

Either that, or the utilities think that all people have the kinds of jobs that allow us to sit at home all day and wait for utility company employees to drop by. I'm not sure what kinds of jobs those are. (Utility company executive jobs, I suspect.)

Anyway, Friday night I went to bed, because Saturday I had to go out of town. On Sunday I worked for 15 hours. On Monday I had to leave the house at 5 a.m. and got home at about 7 p.m., with just enough energy to fall asleep. This didn't leave me much time to sit around waiting for the gas company to come back.

Remarkably, the hot water tank retained enough heat to allow me to take a warm shower on Sunday and a tepid one on Monday. But Tuesday morning ... ee-yow.

I don't remember the last time I had a cold shower --- it might have been when we used to go to Blue Dell Swimming Pool when I was a kid --- but jeez laweez. Shaving in cold water is no treat, either.

As an indication of how addled I am first thing in the morning, I briefly considered warming up some shaving water on the stove ... the gas stove. Uh, right.

To the great credit of the gas company (or at least its blue-collar employees), they sent someone out Tuesday evening about a half-hour after I called. A few minutes of fiddling with the meter, and a few more inside the house, and we were ... you'll pardon the expression ... "cooking with gas" again.

And, remember my original complaint about the gas meter --- or, more specifically, how it hadn't been read in more than two years? (I called to have it updated to an "automatic reading," but was told that it couldn't be because of a "broken screw.")

Well, I've got one of those swell new electronic meters. My next-door neighbor, who works for North Bittyburg's water authority, tells me that the job of converting old gas meters over to the automatic ones was subcontracted out to a private company. That makes me suspect that the "broken screw" was "broken" by the contractor, who left without telling anyone. (The guys playing in the mud on my street are private contractors, too, not company employees.)

All's well that end's well, I suppose. (Or is it "all's well that's gas well"?)

And I suspect I won't have any problems with the gas company for years to come --- it's one of those utilities that rarely, if ever, goes out. If the cable company, for instance, also supplied natural gas, your stove would occasionally explode for no apparent reason, and your hot water tank would sometimes dispense carbolic acid.

But you'll forgive me if I start stockpiling charcoal and lighter fluid ... just in case.