AND IT ISN’T EVEN APRIL FOOL’S DAY….PMC’s Grand Adventure with SCE

UPDATE: PINE MOUNTAIN CLUB, CA (TUESDAY, OCT. 5 at 5:41 p.m.)—
Good news in the midst of the confusion for many people today: The U.S. Postal Service as represented by the Pine Mountain Village USPS contract office was steady and true, even when Southern California Edison was not.
Joan Riley, the always-cordial manager of the Pine Mountain Village post office, writes us that “The Post office was not closed today. When the power stayed on, we opened, and held regular hours.”
So, friends and neighbors, hold the faith. There are still good and virtuous service-oriented people out there. We appreciate them. If you want to know if the village post office is open, their phone number is 661.242.4009. Make your call brief, cause they
have no time to chat, but you can know whether you might be able to go pick up that package you’ve been waiting for!

UPDATE: PINE MOUNTAIN CLUB, CA (TUESDAY, OCT. 5 at 4 p.m.)—On again-off again-on-yet-once-again. Yep. We’ve gone through the Flickersphere with Southern California Edison today. We were all notified SCE power would be out from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Then it wasn’t. Then we were told by SCE that their policy is not to tell customers when they are reversing a power outage alert! Then the power went out! So we all started running in circles again to decide how to adjust our schedules. For those of us without a generator, we also had to decide whether we should go to another place to try to get our work done for four hours of the work day that has been so chopped up and interrupted. Then when we’d wasted good time making plans and coordinating, suddenly, BAM. Light goes on. Water distiller goes on. Power tools across the valley at a building site go back on. The power was out for about 45 minutes between roughly 3:20 and 4:10 p.m. (very approximate) and has now returned.

UPDATE: PINE MOUNTAIN CLUB, CA (TUESDAY, OCT. 5 at 12:46 p.m.)—We want your stories about what happened today! Please click the Breaking News Lightning Bolt above (left top). Then tell us how to reach you, and tell us your story. Yes. We are definitely writing about the inconvenience this posed for members of our community today. When you submit your Breaking News, “unclick” the box, so we know you are a neighbor not a robot with a Russian accent. Look up. Click the Breaking News Lighting Bolt. And you are in.

UPDATE: PINE MOUNTAIN CLUB, CA (TUESDAY, OCT. 5 at 11:45 a.m)—CONFIRMED. We got another refugee from Life As We  Know It who was able to get through the Southern California Edison stockade and has delivered a quizzical report (well worth reading) for this week’s issue of the newspaper. The bottom line: It isn’t their (SCE’s) problem if people kept their kids out of school and had to make medical equipment arrangements and cook for their families ahead of time and not go to work (post office) and … you get it… the list goes on.

We’ll let this outraged correspondent remain anonymous at the moment, but the byline will be there in the newspaper. This is the report from the dark side, after getting through the damp SCE tunnels with the alligators and bats to speak with a customer relations person:

It is the SCE policy to NOT alert about cancelled outages: they consider the power not flipping off AS the alert to us of the cancellation. Maybe a call to action is called for? Send everyone to that cust. svc. # in the subject line of my email, and tell folks to immediately ask for a supervisor, and basically register their URGENT REQUEST that SCE revise their policy of non-notification of outage cancellation. It is outrageous!

Speaking of flipping off… I am hopping mad… not so much on my account, but on account of all the folks whose Facebook comments I”m seeing, who kept kids home, who cancelled their own online classes for students, who made arrangements for their medical equipment… who simply wanted to GO TO WORK (e.g., at the post office… or who wanted to go pick up their PO package AT the post office.. Aarrrgh.

Pine Mountain Club, CA (Tuesday, Oct. 5 at 10:30 a.m.)—A few thousand people have suspended or upended their lives today because of a few emails sent by Southern California Edison (SCE) telling them in a quizzical manner that their power was going to go off today at 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. So the Pine Mountain Post Office closed down,[BAD INFORMATION – SEE NOTE ABOVE,–PO DID NOT CLOSE DOWN]]  store owners closed their shops, people who are working from home rearranged their work schedules…. the list goes on.

Meanwhile, maybe someone with superior superpowers and really dark blackmail info on the president of the company may have gotten through to SCE to get an explanation, but so far our efforts have ended up with lots of recorded messages. Even our secret sources are AWOL.

Sandy Browne of PMC is one of those wicked powerful people, so she says she got through to someone and that it was something of the nature of, “Nope. No outage today.”  Fogiidaboudit. So folks, as you were.

—Patric Hedlund, TME, covered this bucket of crawdads and bunnies story today
Now back to work to get the newspaper to press.

This is part of the October 1, 2021 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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