Of the things that have been going on, the storm water drainage is taking a lot of attention lately. I am amazed at how things are going at times. For example Friday Morning they had tons of giant pipes on the street, and by Friday night, they were all gone. Underground? Moved elsewhere? Probably underground, but still.
As a new element was they are moving some power poles, because the next ingress point will be pretty close to across the street. I thought they were going to start this past Thursday moving wires from the old poles to new poles, so I warned co-workers that I might lose power. They didn’t actually start moving wires until Friday. I have been taking Fridays off, so this would be annoying but less problematic, I guess. It ended up not being a problem until my wife got home and noticed they had dropped some wires in the transfer. They were hanging over the dead end that the driveways of my house and the two others on our dead end.
Come to find out, the wire(s) that were down probably led to the neighbor that lives behind me. She’s in her mid 90s. She gets her land line phone service and DSL from the only game in town. After getting in a phone queue, due to actual wires blocking the street. I got on the web and walked through opening a ticket for her. The first day that they could get her was Tuesday. Mid 90s, no cell phone, Tuesday (4 days later).
I logged into my account to check what else I could do, then about 20 minutes into being on hold, I noticed a different number to call, and called that one (having one on in the background and another on in the foreground) at 35 minutes, once I started talking to a rep, I hung up on the first call, since it was still on hold. I chatted with the rep for a bit expressing that there are wires on the road, neighbor in 90s has no phone service, 3 households perhaps trapped.
So you are thinking, why do I think they are phone wires. Because they look like the phone wires that are going into my house (not that we use them).
I dropped the “how are we supposed to leave with wires across the road, to the farm dinner that we paid a lot of money for” at some point, but Monday was the earliest we could get them out.
After that, My next door neighbor left back to her house, and I went downstairs to try to internet shame them into coming out earlier.
It seems like this went into a slow response time frame, to keep me feeling like there is progress.
So for the phone time, submitting forms, not including internet shaming, 1 hour 15 minutes or so.
I kicked that off, then called MidAmerican. 8 minutes later I was off the phone, I told them I was pretty sure it was phone wire, more then once, That it was a sub contractor associated with the power movement related to the construction of the storm water pipes.
Somewhere between around 7 and around 10:30 (when Shannon went to bed) someone had come (probably MidAmerican) to clean up that wire from hanging down into the street. It’s now piled up to the side of the road.
So my plan is that when / if I get a call Monday, I’ll tell them to work on my 90’s neighbor for the purpose of getting her back with a phone. But Who knows how this is going to work out. I have been honest w/ the rep on Twitter DMs that the wires are cleaned up (ish), but reminded them that my neighbor is without a phone.