The wind is howling and the snow is flying and I’m just in from what my father used to call “a turn round the deck”. It means checking things out in a storm. All is well. The snow blower is covered and has clean gas and lots of oil. The generator is working and the shed doors are tightly shut. I am ready. When I come into the house my wife says; “The lights flickered”. That’s okay. The lights going off in a storm when winds are above ninety and there is freezing rain is something I can live with. I can put the loss of power down to “an act of God”. It is ALMOST losing the lights yesterday and the day before that has me again up on my “hind daddlers”.  (Grandfather was a sealer).

Its the days before the storm that we were admonished once again about the need to conserve power. Why? “A power watch” which means the Holyrood generating station was again having issues. That is what drives me crazy. The prospect of losing it on a nice sunny February day for no apparent reason. That is my issue.

“Power watch”

Please will Light and Power or Hydro people tell me why it is so and tell me why we are on a “power watch”. Can you also tell me that information without all the public relations double talk. Speaking of which, here is a nice phrase  from the middle of the “ power watch”. I heard it on the news. Active customer communication is very important.  Really? I would have thought keeping the lights on would have been very important and not active customer communication whatever that means. Does it mean that when the lights go off the power has failed? Because I might have figured that one myself, or are you telling me the lights might go out again? Also a word that comes with power outages is trip. There was an increase in customer demand causing a “trip” at Holyrood. It sounds to me like it broke down but I’m not an expert. That is the word “trip” as a noun. Is that like going to the Dominican or Mexico? It sounds nice and pleasant. A nice trip. As a verb it sounds equally non-threatening as in tripping-out or tripping the system. It is like something from the 60’s. The Holyrood generator was tripping-out last night. Was it taking LSD or was it broke down again?

Plain talk is all I’m looking for. We are sorry the lights are out. It wasn’t really our fault. We will try and do better, but our stuff is old and it breaks down sometimes. That would be a nice start .