Sitting in the dark again

I had assumed (ooh, a dangerous thing to do!) that, when my power came back on, Sunday afternoon, I would therefore have service from that point on.

You may now picture me banging my head against a wall.

I don't sleep all the way through the night, unless I'm desperately ill. My pattern is one of slumber near death for the first four hours, followed by two hours awake, then three or four more hours of moderately deep sleep. It's a crappy routine, but it's mine.

So, when I wake in the wee hours, I usually watch tv shows I've taped from earlier in the week -- sometimes, just the night before, as I most commonly do Monday nights, with Prison Break and 24 (I watch NBC's Heroes as it airs & save Jack Bauer for my late-late-nights). Last night, I'd polished off 24, and was preparing to work back to PB when the house suddenly went dark.

Dammit! I couldn't even have it sent to my Palm Pilot!

Having heard the recommendation on the local news that "if your power goes out, you should call the power company. Since there are still isolated pockets without power, they may not already know you're in the dark." Okay. It's dark, my flashlight has not had its batteries refreshed, and, for the life of me I can't find the phone book (I seldom use the one at my house, anyway, because I have no land line, and cell calls cost too much, so I usually wait until I can come over here to use Mom & Dad's equipment. Which is what I did last night/this morning).

On the plus side, I have a very warm down comforter supplemented by two very warm purring bodies. I went back to sleep until the sun came up.

So, now I'm over at the folks' place, and first thing I do is call the power company, Ameren. I know they're busy, so I expect to be on hold half the morning. I'm braced for that. What I'm not braced for is that, when I call and follow the dance of fingers on the touch-tone buttons, the machine says, "For faster service, please enter the ten-digit telephone number of the home or business without power."

Hmm.

I stay on the line, hoping to get a live body, or at least a voice mail where I can explain I have no home phone. Nope. They repeat the request, "For faster service, please enter the ten-digit telephone number of the home or business without power."

I stay on the line. There is silence for what seems an eternity (probably about 15 seconds). Finally, a different voice comes on the line, saying that there are many areas in all the following counties still without power: "Mercy" (I think he meant Mercer), Knox, Henderson, and Warren. They hope to have all these areas back on line by 10:00 Tuesday morning.

We shall see.

Meanwhile, wouldn't it have been nice if I'd been able to actually talk to a human being, what with my technical issues and all? Why have they not taken that sort of thing into consideration, especially with the supposedly decreasing numbers of people having the old land line phones in their houses? Shouldn't they consider other options on the customer service lines?