Osprey Causes Power Outage

I had to laugh when I read that headline in last week's Lincoln County News. Actually, I laughed more at this photo of the osprey that ran with the story. Sure does look like he was "electrified," doesn't he? A friend of mine back in Michigan, who used to lose her power very often, claimed a "dog must have peed on a telephone pole again" whenever it happened.

But I wasn't laughing when I woke up on the Saturday in question and we (and 8100 others) didn't have any power. What made it even worse, when I called in to CMP to find out what was going on, the recording said that there was an outage affecting Bristol, Bremen, South Bristol and Damariscotta, and the crews were out patrolling the roads looking for the problem.
Huh? Say what?? Isn't this the 21st century? Isn't it computerized, so if there is a break in the grid, wouldn't it be easy to spot? Apparently not.

The utility companies in this area are somewhat behind the times. I swear the local phone company, Tidewater Telecom (which we refer to as Bilgewater) was probably the last phone system on earth to provide caller id with name. They had it with number, but name didn't come in until just a couple years ago. And even though McDonald's Restaurants will take a debit card, Bilge, I mean Tidewater won't. And you have no option to pay online, of course. And yet they offer DSL??? Of course, theirs was the worst deal around. You have to purchase their proprietary modem (for $200) and then pay $50 a month for the "blazing" speeds of 256 kbps. And pay surcharges if you exceeded their bandwidth limits of 128 kbps.

It's actually not all that surprising. Tidewater used to be GTE. And I had GTE in Caseville, and you couldn't call anywhere but Caseville and Elkton with them. And who was there to call in Elkton?? It wasn't even contiguous with Caseville. And when we installed a phone in the cottage in 1985, we got a party line. There was no way you could have a private line, you were put on a waiting list. After five years, we finally did get a private line, but a recurring nightmare of mine was that I needed emergency service,a dn couldn't get through because someone was on the line.

One good thing here in Maine, the Public Utility Commission forced the phone companies to expand the calling area to be local calls rather than long distance, to all neighboring exchanges. When I first moved out here, all you could call with the 563 exchange was another 563 exchange, South Bristol and New Harbor. Now we can call Waldoboro, Wiscasset and Whitefield, also. Michigan could learn a few things from this PUC; in Holly, our local exchange would only call Holly and Fenton.