Below is a gift from my friend BG; a copy of a letter she sent to her local electric company. She says, "Once, after a six-day outage, I got mad at the electric company. This is what I wrote to them"
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To Whom It May Concern (at the Electric Company),
Sorry
I wasn't home to receive your call Thursday. If it is in your job
description to deal with, redirect and or appease crackpots, I'll be
at this number most of the day tomorrow. Before you call me
though, check out the history of electrical power in America. And
when you do, take note of your progress - we've all seen the old
photos of horse and buggies alongside electric poles and ugly wires;
the first horseless carriages parked near electric poles and ugly
wires; airplanes flying over electric poles and ugly wires; rocket
launches at NASA and on the ground are...electric poles and ugly
wires! Read this at your next CEO conference and watch their faces,
er...light up, so to speak. But the lightbulbs above their heads -
they're NOT lit. Ironic, isn't it?
The defacing of our landscape with poles and wires has been tolerated for many generations, and yet it is a system that we are promised will fail again and again and again. And after all these years, the only answer your guys can come up with is to bury the lines so you can tear up the roads every five minutes to repair them. You haven't thought outside of the box in a hundred years, but perhaps it's because NO ONE WAS YELLING at you to find a better answer - one that doesn't leave you eating the dust of those who've made REAL progress. You didn't have to crank your Ford to start the engine this morning, although I'll bet you passed miles of electric poles and ugly wires (on you way to work in your climate-controlled office). When you call me or another crackpot, I'd wager your phone doesn't have a rotary dial, and I'd bet you also have a cell phone in your pocket; I'd also be on target if I guessed you have a fancy computer on your desk - and one or two at home. The only reason I have time to type this letter is that I don't have to stomp my laundry in a washtub and hang it out to dry; I don't have to chop wood for the stove or heat water for a bath. And to turn on a light I do exactly what my great grandmother did - I flip a switch (when there's not a black-out). And in her yard and in mine...those hideous things that cannot be disguised or hidden, ignored or denied and around which we must exercise a modicum of caution - are those hideous, horrible, anachronistic, horse and buggy, pony express, Little House on the Prairie electric poles and ugly wires. And they are virtually the ONLY thing my great-great-great grandmother would recognize in this world were she to rise from the dead today.
The electric industry's
complacency with OUR complacency with the status quo allows them to be
both an eyesore and an unreliable source of power. We haven't
complained enough or embarrassed you enough to consider any other
answer. Add to those facts that you have no competition forcing you
to make improvements.Your CEOs are lazy and stupid; your company is
lazy and stupid; and I have hundreds of dollars worth of good reasons
to NOT trust you or your service. (That freezer's still for sale,
if you're interested.) And since you cannot deny that I'm right and
retain any credibility, are you sure you still wanna talk to me?
You can reach me at the number in your files,
BG
PS: Note that the background image on Hiram's Rants has those ugly telephone wires at the bottom of it. And if you like this sort of thing, here is that classic, If GM ran like Microsoft
PS: Note that the background image on Hiram's Rants has those ugly telephone wires at the bottom of it. And if you like this sort of thing, here is that classic, If GM ran like Microsoft
