So, it’s 0306. I’d turned out the light at 0002. I’m awake. Why? It’s really, really quiet.
A minute passes. beep-beep-beep Power’s out. I lay in bed, thinking it’s a standard Huntsville Utilities-on-the-mountain outage. A half-hour or so passes, and I begin to tire of the every-minute beep-beep-beep of my uninterruptible power supplies. [I have three: one in my office, and one for each TiVo. Laugh if you want.] I decide to get out of bed and find my phone. Thankfully, I don’t kill myself maneuvering through the apartment in the pitch dark.
As I get to my phone—visible from the blinking green status light—I realize that other lights are on in my complex. No wonder this thing hasn’t been fixed yet—it’s not a substation outage. I log on to the Web to find Huntsville Utilities’ number [Treo 1, utilities 0], call them, and the guy has me walk outside to make sure that the outage is building-wide and not apartment wide. It is, so they send a truck. I put on more clothes and await the truck.
Around 0410, the truck pulls in, and soon, they have their diagnosis—dead transformer. They wait for another truck to bring them a replacement, and I walk back inside and climb back in bed. Predictably, I can’t sleep, since it’s stuffy and absolutely quiet in my bedroom. [I sleep with a fan and an AM radio on at night. It’s the only way I sleep well.] Finally, at 0608, the power returns. Having slept only three hours, I then go back to sleep.
I am really ready to move. [Nine days until I close, and a month after that, I move in.]