Flip that Switch

If You currently work for CMP, if you used too, if your spouse does, if you are Mother Theresa, maybe this specific blog post is not for you. I want you to just take this blog for what it is and what it is, is a girl standing in front of her road, during a pandemic, asking if she can have her power back. I have tried being positive, my brother in law Travis, brought us over his generator to borrow. He is really such a God Send. And you might say, well at least you have that , and your roof and your health. Uggggh, I know I get it, but do people who are really in the pits of despair want to hear at least you have? Do seniors that can’t celebrate graduation want to hear, at least you didn’t get called to war. No, they don’t . That is not helpful in the moment. Especially for us wallowers. We want to sit in our own filth and put the blame on a company, an individual, an ex-boyfriend. We want someone to fix it and right now, that someone is CMP.

To be clear, CMP and I have sustained a tumultuous relationship. I wish we were better to one another, but the history is there and well documented. The fact of the matter is, I need to take ownership as an adult person that I don’t have a generator. That is my fault. I should. Every year I spend my money on clothing, or the spa, or a pyramid scheme. But with that knowledge, I think there is some sort of pop up window at CMP, where if the power goes out. It says restore this woman last, even after everyone else is up and running, go ahead drive down her road, and give her false hope, but don’t fix anything YET.

This past fall, it was November, not your peak outage time you might think and my family and I heard a loud boom, followed by lights out. I reported the issue, as any girl would and that is to say, I stood in my Luke Bryant concert t-shirt on the porch and called 45 times. I then began to receive update alerts saying your power will be restored in four hours. I check their World War 2 website and I learn that there are only six of us in the state without power. This prompts me to call the hotline. I get on the phone with a lovely individual. Her and I go back and forth and she tells me that now my power won’t be restored until the following day. I’m not proud of my behavior at this point, but when she said we don’t have the equipment to fix this issue, I may or may not have said something about my bill and putting the money toward said equipment. Needless to say, her and I we are not in a book club together, still to this day. Of course, as the universe would have it, when I go to jury duty the following day, I see her, glaring at me, Miss call center and that’s pretty much how my life goes.

Now I’m not downplaying the number of outages, or the line people working hard. What I am going to shit all over is the outage list. People, it is 2020, we have got to do better than assessing. We have got to amp it up a notch, to tailor to our customers. We live in a time, when we can shout at a robot to turn our lights on, we live at a time, when our toddlers can face our phones at us and order games without our consent. We have got to do more than assessing. For example, when I took my husband to get hernia surgery, there is a screen that says he is in pre-op, then surgery, then post-op. Imagine if there wasn’t? Imagine if just said assessing. That would lead to a hysterical woman like myself going what the f have you done with my husband? Consider education if you will, that is my playground. Imagine, if I wrote assessing on little Bobby’s report card. How then could his mother proclaim him a genius at the next pampered chef party. She couldn’t. And that is why we have social norms, technological norms we must follow in covid times. I would even settle for something, ANYTHING, but assessing. Even something snarky, like get dem candles girl, or you got SOME houses ahead of you. Just anything. Look, I’m beating my head against the wall. The Easter Bunny is supposedly coming, we are all social distancing and ego imploding, just give me something to work with.