Update

Well the tree made it until it could be cut down. I really hated to do that. I love the old trees in my neighborhood, but that tree really needed to come down and I figured having it taken down professionally was better than the gradual, piece-by-piece, way the tree had been falling on its own. Still, I'm going to miss that old hackberry. By the way, tree removal is not cheap, but I wouldn't want to do it for a living.

So now I'm about 4 grand poorer (tree and electrical repairs), but life has returned to normal -- almost. I'm still waiting on the cable guys. Once I got power back I called about the cable. The nice guy I talked to said they already knew of the downed lines and they had a guy scheduled to come out and put my line back up on Monday (the 2nd). Come Monday (hey, that's a Buffett song) I got a call from the cable guy. He had reconnected the line to my house and the new power pole, but he said there was some problem with the quantum inversion filter (okay that wasn't the actual problem, but I don't speak "cable") and he couldn't repair that. Another guy would come back Tuesday to do that.

Well Tuesday was my tree removal day, so I wasn't really surprised that the cable guy didn't make repairs that day. [I wouldn't have wanted to be up on the utility pole while the tree guys were working.] I was, though, a little surprised that no one called to explain why they weren't fixing my cable. Regardless, I figured they'd be out Wednesday. Nope. So late Wednesday afternoon I called the cable company again. This time I got an idiot on the other end. It took her three tries before she could get my phone number right an access my account. Once she did that and I told her my story, she essentially called me a liar. She insisted that her report showed the technician completed his job on the 2nd. I agreed with her about that, but I repeated the part of the story where he called to say there was an additional problem. Her reply to that: Well what was the additional problem? I seemed to fall even lower in her estimation after admitting I didn't know what the problem was. She also didn't seem to appreciate my belief that THEY would be better equipped to answer that question than I was. Anyway, after much repeating she agreed to schedule another guy to come look at my supposed cable problem. [I got the strong sense she believed I really did have cable service the whole time.] At least I thought she was going to schedule someone.

She put me on hold to go check one more thing. When she came back she said it looked like there might be a general outage somewhere in my area so it wasn't just me that didn't have cable. I tried to explain to her that even if there was a general outage, that wasn't the problem with my cable. Mine was out due to damage from the tree falling. "I know," she said. "Several people may be out right now." I tried AGAIN to explain my problem was unrelated to the potential general outage, but she would have none of it. "Your cable should be back up in just a couple of hours," she assured me. Seeing as how I was getting nowhere, I bid her good day and resigned myself to calling back Thursday.

Thursday morning I got a much more reasonable guy who listened to and believed my story. He scheduled a guy and even put a "rush flag" on it. Given that I'd called early, he supposed someone would get to me that day. Nope. As of noon on Friday I'm still waiting. If it weren't for the baseball package, I'd just tell them not to even bother fixing it at this point. As it is, though, they kind of have me over a barrel. Hence, I'm venting to y'all.

Oh well, at least I have power again and the tree is gone. I'm trying to look on the bright side.