pogma

I spent most of the afternoon listening to the UPS beeping, waiting a while, shutting down the computers, waiting for the power to come back on, powering everything up, and repeating. Manitoba Hydro seems to be like its counterparts all over North America, and is not able to deliver electricity reliably to consumers. Why? In the time we spent in Japan, power went out a couple of times, due to earthquakes and typhoons, never for more then a few minutes. I think that in Japan the power companies inspect power lines regularly and remove branches from trees that are encroaching, and ensure that everything is ship-shape. I guess that here, there is no inspection done, failure is expected. Consumers here seem to think that it is normal for power to go out. No blame is assigned.

Similarly, last week, MTS had an outage for their DSL in my suburb, a phone call to them resulted in an estimate of “between 30 minutes and a few hours” before it was fixed. The person on the other end of the phone exhibited no surprise and expressed no apology for the outage. I don’t know what I expected, I’m only paying through the nose for my DSL line!

This attitude that outages are “normal” from both the utilitiy companies and consumers is depressing.