January 5, 2011: Back to the Office

It is Wednesday and after spending yesterday at home I am back to work as usual today.  Jeff and Sarah are on their way to their new lives in California.

Once into the office I settled in a little and got down to business.  I was sitting at my desk and thought that I heard a voice that I had not heard in a very long time but sounded incredibly familiar.  Then I realized that it is my “boss” back from India!  I haven’t seen him in a couple of years.  If I remember correctly, the last time that I saw him was at a bar in New Jersey sometime in 2008.  It is unbelievable that I have not seen him in this amount of time.  That is crazy.  This is his first time ever in Texas.  It took three days of flying for him to reach here.  The weather has been affecting flights all over the world.

This evening, before leaving the office, I finally managed to call TXU (Texas Utilities, I believe that that stands for) and talked to them about the power issues that we have been having at the house.  John, our electrician, had guessed that the issues were internal to the house and not external but had felt that there was enough concern to warrant testing by the power company so had asked us to call, just to be safe.

TXU said that given that this was an ongoing surge and brown out situation that we should escalate directly to OnCore and let them handle it as they are the actual service delivery providers.  So I called OnCore and, after getting them to understand the issue, they realized that it was very serious and rushed someone out to the house.  I asked to get an estimate on arrival time and they said that they couldn’t give me one.  So I didn’t know if it would be an hour or two days.

OnCore was at the house in under an hour!  I guess that they are considering the power issues to be more serious than we had imagined.  Dominica IM’d me to tell me that they were there so I instantly shutdown at the office and hoped in the car and zipped home.  Unfortunately it was rush hour traffic so it took a good hour to get home which made the whole exercise a bit pointless.

OnCore had left long before I got home but Dominica had good news: OnCore had discovered that there was no neutral going from the street to our house!  Well that explains it.  It does not explain why the former owners of the house lives, presumably for several years, without working electric.  So OnCore said that they would be back first thing in the morning to get this fixed as it was dark and very late this evening.

This is very encouraging.  We were in a panic that the electric was going to cost us thousands of dollars to get resolved and would require us to rip the house all up.  Not the case.  Now we are confident that our electric is going to be fixed and we won’t have to pay a dime.  The Lord watched over us big time on that one.  We are quite relieved.

Leave a comment