Let’s all take a moment, sigh a big sigh together, and say a little prayer for Earl. You see, he’s had to endure my on-call mood of the weekend, which could best be described as “surly”.
Before leaving work last night, I was delighted to see that the weather forecast included clearing skies with a 20% chance of scattered showers. This meant that the weather wasn’t going to be a big factor in on-call this weekend and it should be relatively quiet.
Never count your chickens before they rain.
Mother Nature pulled her “ha ha” card out and blessed her children with a night of strong thunderstorms. Frequent lightning, downpours, heavy wind; she gave us the works. Usually I’m delighted by this sort of atmospheric activity and while I was trying to find some positive energy in the continuous thunder, I was actually sitting up in bed, holding my pager up like an offering to the sky and pleading non-stop, “don’t ring, don’t ding, don’t ring, don’t ding, don’t beckon, don’t ring.” Tom didn’t like the chanting, so he went under the bed. Earl snored through the whole ordeal.
Around 4:00 a.m., the sounds of thunder faded off into the distance. The pager had not gone off at all. I’d made it! I’d made it through a thunderstorm without a Mr. Telephone Man emergency.
“Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep”.
A customer in the eastern most location of our area code, a rural high school, had lost their phone service.
Jinkees.
So I did my little technological marvel thing and determined that I could see their end of the wire between the two cans, they must be experiencing a power outage. I’d deal with in the morning.
So I slept a little while, dreaming about this school and getting it mixed up with my school clock collection when the pager went off again. The circuit is still not up.
I won’t bore you with the remaining details, but suffice it to say that I’ve been very busy with many storm related outages throughout the day today. Things have settled down since supper and the skies have cleared somewhat, but all I can say is “God Bless Earl”, for he put up with one cranky telephone man today.
