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Health & Fitness

Conspiracy Theory

I have no power. And I have a generator. Here's why.

I’ve always firmly believed that JFK was assassinated by a covert consortium funded by the mafia, planned by the CIA, armed by Communists, and executed by aliens who have, for six centuries, been plotting an invasion that will occur immediately after the next presidential inauguration, when Dick Cheney is sworn in (didn’t see that coming, did you?).

Therefore, I have no problem in being absolutely certain that the recent freak weather we’ve been having lately is a conspiracy that has as its target: me.

Here I am, innocently moving to North Stamford back in May, and then a few months later I’m suddenly living in Florida because there’s a friggin’ hurricane! The first one since, like 1939 or something. Then, less than two months after that–boom!–I’m residing in Minnesota for a snowstorm–in October! The first time that’s happened since the Ice Age!

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What’s up with that?

I’ll tell you what’s up. Connecticut Light & Power is conspiring with the company that sold us a generator to run us out of town. "We don’t want your kind moving here from Westchester for our lower taxes and many nail salons," they are saying. "Get out!"

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You may think I’m a raving lunatic for believing that these companies would go through the trouble of creating weather and inconveniencing millions of people for weeks at a time solely to drive my family and me back to New York.

But I’ve got evidence!

When we bought the house, we noticed that the previous owners had jerry-rigged an emergency generator that, the inspector told us, was as like to explode as to provide electricity. But it clued us in that there might be frequent enough power outages to warrant the endangerment of the immediate vicinity.

So as part of the plans for a major kitchen renovation that began in July, we included two huge propane tanks and a generator the size of a Volkswagen.

Installation was scheduled for around the second week in September. So you can image our frustration when Hurricane Irene hit the last week of August and knocked our power out. CL&P delayed restoring electricity to our home as long as it was believably possible to do so, but around the time that power was back in 99.99% of the state, they figured it would look silly to have one house highlighted on the outage map.

This was when CL&P enlisted the help of the company that sold us the generator. This company shall remain nameless in case an employee reads this and decides to get revenge.

So the generator gets installed, the tanks get put in (to give you an idea of the size of the tanks: if one was attached to your barbecue grill, your barbecue grill would need to be a small colonial house), and everything was hooked up.

We were ready, then, for any future power difficulties.

Not so much.

You see, the generator company must first schedule an official test and on-site tutorial. What they don’t have to do is schedule it in a timely manner.

On October 20, a tree fell in our neighborhood and took down a power line. There was no storm, no wind, no rain. I can only imagine that Irene had weakened this tree and someone had come along and blown on it, like Bugs Bunny used to do at the end of a fight when his opponent was wobbling but still standing.

So we had no power, even though there was a brand new, fully-fueled generator alongside our house. I called the generator company to ask them to schedule the test and tutorial sooner rather than later, and they said it would be at least two weeks. They didn’t say why. But we know why, don’t we?

Because they had already planned their coup d’grace–the ridiculous October snow storm which cannot possibly have been a work of nature.

So I am writing this from my sister-in-law’s house–in Westchester. My power went out about 2PM Saturday. Sunday evening, I checked the CL&P outage status website and was told my power would be back at 6:30 PM. I did not have much confidence in this prediction, however, since it was 6:45PM at the time, and I knew our power was still off, because our answering machine didn’t pick up. By 11:00, the status had been updated to "our crews are working on it but we can’t give you a time estimate." The next morning, the update read something like, "We really have no idea when it will be fixed."

CL&P may be the only company that makes things less fixed as time goes by.

And here’s the final piece of evidence: by Monday morning, most of Stamford had power back. But we didn’t.

We with our Volkwagen generator and hippo gas tanks. Coincidence? I think not.

And while they might have chased me back to Westchester for now, I will be back.

Once that last dot on the outage map goes away.

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