Unsolicited advice

If you're like me, you don't keep phone books around because it's too easy to just look phone numbers up online.

One phone number you really should have in your cell phone, as well as written somewhere safe, is the emergency number for your electric company.

If the power's out and you don't have internet on your phone or a laptop with a charged battery, you can't Google it. Yeah, you can call 411 but that costs money. There are services like http://www.free411.com and Google's 411 but I didn't think of that pre-coffee. I wound up looking the power company up on my Kindle. (Kind of makes up for that Orwell thing.)

When the power went out at 9:00 am, it was already in the 90's here. You get a lot of interesting thoughts going through your head when it's supposed to be 113° and your AC is silent. (I wonder what security would do if I went to work with my cat in tow.) When I found the number and heard the recording saying that they were working on it, I felt a little better. And they did fix it 1 hour and 20 minutes before they predicted.

If you just put the number in your cell, it's one less annoyance when the power goes out.

~~Code Monkey