What my luck is like

When we bought the house, the inspector pointed out the way the wire bringing magical electricity and all its wonders into our house was totally frayed. Not the wire itself so much as the insulation that surrounds the wire, but it's still not really the way you want it to be.

I showed it to a certain handy husband of a friend of mine and he shrugged it off with an "I've seen worse. In fact, I have worse on our building downtown." This was sort of reassuring, but I was still not happy with it. Then I had this unemployed electrician recommended by Jeremy's coworker come over to look at the overall electrical picture and I told him about that exterior wire. When he went out to look at it, he said, "I've had people tell me things were frayed and they usually aren't so bad, but that really needs to be taken care of." Fine.

So I called an actual electrician (not one who failed the test "by only 2 questions") and he came out to look at it. After he had a minor freak out about how those pansies at the electric company were going to want to move the meter onto the front of the house because they are afraid of a little snow falling on their heads (or something to that effect) and how it was going to look terrible and I should give them a hard time blahblahblah, he said he needed to set up a schedule with them and get back to me. That took months. Over 2 months.

So they set up a time and he told me it would be a thousand dollars and would involve no power in the house for 6 hours. The original estimate he gave me was about $700. So I called him on it and he said, "Hold on, let me do the math, oh yeah, it'll probably be about $650. Where did I come up with $1000?" Man, I do not know the answer to that question.

Well, I get up early on the appointed day so that I can have a shower and do all those wonderful things that require electricity only to have him call and cancel because of the snow. I was a little annoyed. So, the work was rescheduled for tomorrow. Our forecast is calling for 2-4 inches of snow tonight plus sleet and freezing rain all day tomorrow. I called him today to find out if we should just go ahead and assume it isn't happening tomorrow. He says, "You were pretty annoyed last week, so I don't want to cancel if I don't have to. You're not having very good luck with this, are you?"

That's where he's wrong, because every week they have to delay it is another week that $650 stays in my hands, not theirs.