Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Success

This blog was originally designed to lampoon our electric company. Many of the entries are taken from actual experiences, history, and just humorous ideas. I put a lot of effort into the graphics and measured my success at how many of my graphics would appear on Google Images when searching for the company's name. It was very successful in the day. About half of the images were mine, all critical of the company. Since that time, the power company has added many pictures to their website or somewhere. I notice my blog logo is still up near the top, however. :)   I can use my fertile imagination to think that some person was in charge of getting more pictures to post to drown me out. But that is probably just sillyness. Perhaps they had to subscribe to one of those companies that protect "reputation" from the likes of me or basically game the Internet search engines to accepting some version of reality. Oh, again, just silliness.

Since the time I began and ended my campaign, the reliability of the power in our subdivision went from abysmal to pretty much perfect. We rarely have an outage and when there is an outage it is fixed rather quickly. My subdivision was my only concern. It was really kind of dangerous to have the unreliable power we had. In addition, it was costly. I lost a refrigerator and a freezer to the surges. I paid for surge protectors and I even bought a generator which is unused. My heat pump also suffered once but it was under warranty. 

I leave the graphics here because... honestly, I think I was fairly clever and my anger was channeled into a better direction. It is a lesson for me to remember. Overall, despite the expenses I incurred, the crappy power company problem experience was positive once the problem was fixed. I do not necessarily think that my efforts had anything to do with the improvement in service, but I have long ago concluded that, indeed, our electric service has improved, probably for the foreseeable future.

Sometimes the crappiness of life makes the good moments all the sweeter. When I was young we moved to New Jersey for about a year. It was an awful experience having a southern dumb sounding accent in part of my first grade year there. I was bullied, not necessarily with violence except on one occasion but with general ostracism. The good things I can remember: the strawberry field behind our trailer park, my mother and I having lunch in a grove of weeping willows, the music class that the whole school attended, and my first experience on a bike without training wheels... these things and many others are all the sweeter because of the dismal daily reality from which they sprung. So thank you TREC... I had never had bad service before and now I appreciate good service. Keep up the good work.

Click here for all the graphics.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Tallapoosa River Electric Cooperative, Inc. Back to Business

Tallapoosa River Electric Company, Inc.  or crack, bzzz, flicker, hmmmm, pfffft

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Still Here

Trust me. Still here but with a few more important things to do. 3 more weeks till you can resume feeling my pain. :)

Thursday, September 27, 2012


Just a quick one. I have no time!!!!

And just another day in the universe of those guys who run things. I had said something nice about Tallapoosa River Electric Cooperative (TREC) on my TREC Member Facebook page. I had friendly people over from TREC to tell me that I was doing everything right from an electricity savings perspective. I asked them tons of questions and they were polite on each one. Things were on a roll for TREC. This is a free service and they seemed to handle it totally competantly and with the utmost respect even though I showed up to the door in my pajamas. :)  But.... all has changed.

One phone call later. Seriously, I was just following up to the strangest looking diagram with barely readable instructions with no explanations as to why. It was like trying to do a science project without my father. :)

This completely acceptable rudeness (in response to my own intrinsic rudeness) has spurred me on. Look in the future for TREC TUMBLR and a dedicated TREC FLICKR because currently I just load the graphics onto my own FLICKR account. Graphics from FLICKR make up a goodly portion of those indexed in Google. I'm looking into Reddit and other social media sites for expanding coverage of this and all my blogs. It is good to keep on top of the thing. Currently though, my time is being exhausted from election stuff. In a little over a month I will say goodbye to doing so many political graphics and get to my normal life. Try coming up with something new to say every day that might be important enough for people to share.  Gees. :)    

But as this too shall pass, I will find myself with extra time to TREK around a universe of possiblities.

I don't think I have ever said it on this particular blog. Social media is rapidly changing the structure of society. The latest most obvious case was where the billionaires had basically completely purchased all the media outlets as per one subject, the election. Thanks to the Supreme Court, they really thought they had it. HOWEVER, the one event that cost but average dollars eclipsed the whole purchased lot of them.  This occcured through modern social type media sourcing technology, a secret video, and an old media outlet turned online outlet "Mother Jones" and away she went.

How many billions of dollars went down the hole to purchase commercials eclipsed by the online push of one item? Yes, from Chick Fil A to the recent incident at Kroger's, there will soon be a way we communicate with each other. We will hold companies accountable for what they do. It will rival those attempts by the companies themselves to frame their businesses through advertising and will no doubt eventaually overrun these attempts.

Good service. Reliable service. Friendly service. We have a lot to look forward to and thank Facebook, thank social media.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

That Moment When...



 
Another Tallapoosa River Cooperative Member's Page production, in close association with Tallapoosa River Cooperative Member's Blog.
That moment when you realize, in old episode of Mannix, that the electrical posts going by in a car chase look ten years ahead of the one's providing you power.