What I wouldn’t give for a realtime map from the folks at Seattle City Light that showed where there was power, where there wasn’t, and what the status was for the areas that didn’t have power yet. In case you didn’t know, our fragile energy-based ecosystem was toppled briefly here in the Pacific Northwest by wind. Yes, wind. We’re now 72 hours without power at our house. (Hence the lack of posting on Friday here on Jackson Fish.) It’s getting to the point where I think we need a jacksonfish.com header graphic where all the lights are out – even the streetlights (at least until we get our power back). We finally gave up and checked into a hotel. It’s way way cold in the house. The thing is, I know the power company has all the information I want to see. Why they can’t put it up on a page that I can access from my browser (my phone browser that is) I don’t know. This reminds me of a recent experience…

I used to have DSL. At a certain point however I couldn’t deny the speed advantage of cable. I called up Comcast and had them hook me up. For five months our marriage was blissful. The one day the honeymoon ended. Our internet service started being incredibly flakey. A fatal error to the service would have been preferable. The chronic outages were akin to torture. They would only last for a few hours per instance which is way shorter than Comcast takes to respond to an outage report. You can imagine how much fun I had hearing the comcast repair guys utter the same sentence with every successive visit: “It’s kind of hard to figure out what’s wrong when it’s working.” Comcast actually was relatively dilligent in trying to fix things (nobody came over for a nap). Things have gotten somewhat better these days, but I’m loathe to declare victory for fear of angering the cable gods. And clearly they are responsible for my pain.

The real lesson of my history of interactions with the Comcast folks was what I divined through hours of precision questioning. Often when I would call my Comcast buddy on the other end of the line would tell me that I hadn’t had problems in x days or y hours. Since Comcast could ping my modem to see if it was visible from their end I assumed this was some log they kept where they pinged my modem every so often to monitor for outages. But one day I called to report the service down, and had them ping my neighbors to see if they were down too. Once they determined that we were all off the grid, they decided to send someone out and that it wasn’t just my issue. During this interaction they I discovered that Comcast only declares an outage if some minimum number of customers call and report one. I was incredulous as surely their monitoring service could tell them that info without the need for anyone to call. Wrong! Those logs that were being quoted to me were actually logs of me calling. So when I would call to complain about an outage, the person on the other end of the line would say the equivalent of “well you haven’t called in x hours or y days”. No shit sherlock. This revelation led me to ask why they didn’t have a monitoring service since they could tell when something was down. The friendly person on the other end kind of sighed and said “we just don’t”.

I suppose it could be a cost issue… i.e. the system doesn’t have great uptime, hiccups are frequent but short-lived (except in my case) and since most customers don’t rely on their service 24×7 they never notice in the first place. If they responded to every outage the mythical monitoring service reported they would be spending way more money on truck rolls. That said, I have to imagine me calling Comcast all the time has to cost them money as well. The truth is, I have no idea why Comcast doesn’t have automated monitoring of their network down to the node level. But I think they should. Of course I want my service to have five nines of uptime. But I also think I’d like an SMS to my cel every time the service is down and they were on the case. That way if I encounter the problem I don’t have to wonder if they’re working on a fix. Is that too much to ask?

UPDATE

It appears our power was restored last night at 2:30am. Though at least one of our neighbors is still out (literally the house next door). We’re on our way home to clean out the fridge and clean up the mess we made in the dark and cold. I have to wonder to what extent our phone calls to Seattle City Light affected how soon we were fixed. This is speculation of course, but when we first called yesterday morning they had no record of anyone coming to fix our area. By the afternoon they’d noted that a downed tree was causing the problem, and predicted power back in 24 hours. In between were at least two phone calls. I think everyone thinks that the power outage is so obvious and the systems at the power company so advanced that there’s no need to call. I’d love to hear from someone who knows the reality of how these decisions get made and to what extent reports from customers affect priorities.