The past 24 hours haven’t been great for our dependence on public utilities and the like: Last night we lost power for about an hour last night because of the storms, and about an hour after it came back on, we lost cable for TWO hours.
Then this afternoon as I was heading to work, I noticed that there was water gushing up between the seams in the stream in front of our house.
I’ve seen this before. In the more than 10 years that we’ve been in this house, there have been about six times that they’ve had to shut off the water and dig a hole in the street to fix the water lines. The last time was about three years ago; it was cold and raining, and at about 9 in the evening one of the utility workers knocked on our door to warn us that they’d be shutting off the water in 30 minutes.
The time before that, we found out by hearing the jackhammers and pumps at 3 o’clock in the morning, but I suspected earlier that something would be happening, since I saw water flooding from another house’s water meter flowing into the gutter.
And thus I was right: About 5, the work crews showed up and tore the part of our lawn next to the street.
Fortunately, they got it fixed in just a few hours, but it’s odd that all these utilities broke down within a 24 hour period.
Then, add to that the fact that as of tomorrow, thanks to our Wise Benevolent Protectors in the federal government, you’ll no longer be about to watch TV from an analog broadcasted signal. Our bureaucratic overlords have determined that nobody needs to watch TV in a place where the TV isn’t hooked up to something.
We’ve got one of those digital attennas on our breakroom TV at work, and it’s crap-diddly-tastic, It only picks up half of the broadcast channels, and most of those are unwatchable because of the picture freezing and skipping.
And why is the government so hot on having everyone have digital TVs?
Remember the old Yakoff Smirnoff joke? “In Soviet Union, TV watches YOU!”
It turns out that there are theories that the reason for DTV is to give the government two-way transmission capabilities.
In other words, to keep an eye on us while we’re keeping an eye on Real Housewives of Orange County.
Yeah, they can’t keep the water, power or cable going, but they’re trying to run a video feed from each of hour houses.