So yesterday evening I get a call from my fianceé, who was stumbling around our house in the dark, tripping over the cats and wondering why there was no power. We live on a grid in Catonsville that is about as twitchy as a crack whore; a child sneezes in Minneapolis and we lose our electricity. I think it’s safe to say that in six months I’ve dealt with more blackouts in this house than an Irish dockworker, so I was ready to light the hurricane lamps and wait out the repairs, but she told me all the other houses on our grid still had power….?!? At this point I became confused, because when half my bank account recently disappeared with an audible thunk, I knew the current bill had been paid. Jen called BG&E to find out what the hell was going on while I drove home. As it turns out, the good doctor, who has been dead and buried two years, still has an open balance on his account. This problem is exacerbated by BG&E’s insistence on listing his account at the ‘2nd floor’, while we are listed as the ‘1st floor’. The CSR looked at our records, put Jen on hold, then came back and admitted their mistake—they saw activity on his account, and decided without notifying us or realizing that there’s only one meter to shut the power off at 2:45 yesterday afternoon. (It’s a lucky thing the temperatures are still in the 40’s, because if that 12-pack of beer in the fridge we just bought had skunked, I would have been apoplectic.)