Michael: High Voltage Comedy

The darkening skies
Assure the brilliant green leaves
Their thirst will be quenched.

Thursday, June 16, 2016

Last year the electric company replaced the old wooden posts with cement poles on the road to Rio Sereno. This year they’re stringing the cable. In certain sections along the road, by our house for instance, PVC water pipes run just below or exposed on the ground right below the utility poles. So here you have a bunch of guys with ladders and other heavy equipment working for weeks around our PVC water pipes. And, yes, comedy ensues.

And here’s the way it works here. The electric company workers break a pipe. They place a large rock over the break. Our water pressure drops. The water company only responds if you tell them where the leak is. We find the leak. We call the water company. It promptly gets fixed. Repeat several times a week until the electric company has moved beyond your neighborhood.

It’s ridiculous though that we’ve got to serve as the middleman. If it’s inevitable that a pipe is going to get broken now and then I don’t see why this isn’t acknowledged and why the utility companies don’t work together or minimally the electric company could make the call to the water company to say “Oops, happened again.”

But that’s not the way it works here. Fortunately, they’ve now moved up the road and taken their act to the few scattered neighbors we have between us and the border town of Rio Sereno.