The Pain in the Ass Electricity

At 10 pm Wednesday night, the power went off.

We looked out over the valley and the lights were on. Uh oh.

This means that the problem is local and possibly on my semi-private 600 meters of power line.

I have been dreading the first time we try to get service from Union Fenosa.

We don't speak enough Spanish to make the call for help.

We get a Panamanian friend who makes the call for us. They promise to have it fixed in 24 hours. As a matter of fact, they are bound by law to fix it in 24 hours.

We'll see.

Friday morning, still no power. So much for the 24 hour thing.

Yella goes to the local Union Fenosa office, gets our Panamanian friend on the phone to help, and they tell us it's fixed.

How typical.

NO IT'S NOT, DAMN IT!!!

They give us the run around. Their own office can't get through to Panama City to order another fix. This goes on for 3 hours.

Cripes!

They now promise us it will be fixed in 24 hours. I say, what about the last 24 hours? Well, this is a NEW repair ticket with a NEW 24 hour period.

Oh, I see, this is how they get around the 24 hour law. They start a new set of 24 hours.

Much to their credit, they fixed it a 6 pm Friday night. I was impressed by this.

A fox (I didn't know there were foxes here) got fried in the electric line and blew the fuse in the transformer. When they fixed the other problems in our area on Thursday, they didn't check to see if our was fixed. (We have a new stretch of power line that is isolated from the rest of the community.) So we didn't get fixed with the first request.

All is well now...for the time being...

Off to a chili cook off this afternoon!