Sorry my tree crushed the power line

While I’m bitching about the storm, I’ll go ahead and add my rant about Ameren.

My tree snapped my next door neighbor’s electric line 6 AM Friday morning. She called Ameren and they tell her they will be out. So she sits in her house without power and heat, yet thankful that no one was hurt. The meter reader comes by. Our meter is indoors so I actually talk to the guy. He asked me if I knew that there was a line down. I told him that it was my neighbor’s line and that she had called in to report it. He also called in to report it. We think maybe this will speed things up, considering it is laying in the road and alley way.
My husband comes home and begins hacking away at the limb balancing on our cable line. He also hacks at the tree that smashed the neighbor’s shed and partially landed on her son’s car. We see Ameren on the block behind our and get excited. “Neighbor is getting power back!” we foolishly think. Ameren pulls down our street, slows down, looks at the down line and keeps on driving. We almost cried. So I call Ameren to complain about the down line and lack of power. They tell me that they will get right on it.
Fast forward to later that night, the neighbor calls back to check the status of Ameren as her house gets colder and colder. She is told that it was reported as only a line down and not a power outage. WTF???? I’m not sure what else a line down could mean! Considering she called and told them she had no power and I called to report her lack of power, how the hell could they not know she had no power?
Finally after 36 hours without power Ameren shows up. The technician asked if she was okay. She told him that if she had a stick up her ass she would be a popsicle. He told her he didn’t have a stick! Okay they redeemed themselves a bit with that line. Finally her power was restored.
We understand that there are priorities such as hospitals, traffic signals, etc. but be competent in the first place. Shit, any moron knows that no line no power. Why doesn’t the call center?
We really appreciate the men and women who had to work in the weather to restore services to the city. It isn’t their fault. They do the job dispatch tells them. As the weather today gets shittier and shittier I really hope we don’t have another on like last Thursday and Friday.

Ameren’s tips for staying cool

With the weather so hot and humid Ameren was nice enough to release tips to help us beat the heat. Here are a few:

Open your fridge and stand with the door open. Your food may go rotten but you have all this extra money to replace it, right?

Buy a window unit for every window in your house and run them all on high. While you are at it why not plug a fan into every empty electrical outlet you have and run it too. Ahhhh, can’t you feel the relief!

Take a hot bath. When you get out of the tub you will feel cooler (Illinois American Water – We expect our kickback to be left in the usual place!).

Turn your air conditioneer to 65 degrees F. Every degree you turn it down is a few dollars closer we get to trading in our Jaguars for Bentleys!

Hopefully if you follow Ameren’s tips they will be able to reinstate their caviar and Cristal breaks and leave that lowly 16% profit they had last quarter in the dust.