25 July—Last week, because it’s “committed to bringing you safe and reliable energy,” Connecticut Light & Power—whoops, mea culpa, and peccavi, I mean Eversource—warned captive customers on my power block that our electricity would be turned off—“temporarily disconnected”—some time or times during four-hour periods on one (or both?) of two days. But with the legendary dependability captive customers of Eversource have come to expect and learned to live with, it never happened. Kind of like the U.S. Postal Service, when you think about it.

Predictably, then, yester-morning, my neighbors and I got a robo-call from the sociopathic, ever-metastasizing utility warning—Eversource would prefer “advising”—that we’d be powerless for unspecified duration or durations this morning between 8:00 and noon. The notice said we’d be “temporarily disconnected,” but I prefer “powerless” because that’s precisely what captive customers are with all monopolies.

Yesterday’s mail, however, contained a letter moving that iffy powerless period forward to Wednesday afternoon between 1:00 and 5:00. Which was it, then, today or tomorrow?

So I phoned CL&P for clarification and an obviously overworked operator rather curtly told me it was both. Or either. (Maybe a supervisor was listening.) I couldn’t pin her down. And how could she know anyway? Obviously they’d try for the earlier date, she volunteered, but “you never can tell with Eversource.” (The supervisor must have left.)

You never can tell indeed. That’s for sure. Because this morning the power went off just after 7:30. The generator kicked in several seconds later. About a minute after that, line power came back on and the generator cycled off. Was that it? We’ll see.

In all events, when Eversource tells its captive customers anything at all, we should have learned by now not to believe a word of it. Except, of course, that we have to pay the buggers the second highest electric rates in the United States—lower only than those in Hawaii, in the middle of nowhere . . .