The first thing that crossed my mind at 6:40am when I was awoken 2.25 hours early? Oh No, Did I forget to pay the power bill? I haven't forgotten in 5 years but since there was clearly no power and I had clearly been forgetful and not feeling well lately, I was sure that my morning would begin with another confrontation with Ameren IP. Specifically regarding their conversion of Illinois Power's "levelized plan" into their own hell-spawned "budget plan" (as in the "we just busted your fucking budget" plan.) If you are confused, read this prior post for all the details.
Of course Ameren had offered no assistance or payment plans to get through our month of "unlevelized" bill, so I had taken it upon myself to tell them that I would make my own payment plan, which they didn't like, but I told them tough. So now I was thinking that they had decided that they were sick of my payment plan, but upon thinking it through more clearly, I remembered that I had just made another $150 electronic payment yesterday, so unless they decided to punish me for paying, it was probably a townwide outage. I am telling Evan "look up and down the street, does anyone else have power?" He is going "no one else has lights on" and that was such a comforting moment. So Evan had to leave without a shower so that he could accompany a family member on an expedition, and I lay in bed calling Illinois Power on his cell phone via 411.
I am still in denial about AmerenIP because I still want to call them Illinois Power. It took me almost two years to call GTE "Verizon" and I am still calling the local bar "Ricky's" instead of "the Dawg House."
So while I am praying that their touchtone menus don't say "We have disconnected your service for non-payment" (without a disconnection notice) I get "we are aware of your outage. we expect your service to be restored by 8am. There are 400 residents in your outage area without power." That tells me someone sheared off a pole or something so I can finally rest and go back to sleep. With a mental note to pay the water bill and another power bill installment on Friday.
P.S. Feeling better today, going to take a nice bath and go to work at noon. Hoping to be less hormonal today than Sunday and yesterday.
P.P.S. I wonder if Blogrolling is "powered" By AmerenIP. It looks like they are down this morning too. Oh the HORROR! How will I get to my other morning blog reads!
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