Today, I picked up Tricia’s Volvo XC60, which arrived at the local dealer this week after an “intensive examination” by Customs and Border Patrol delayed its entry into the USA.
I used the navigation system for the first time today because it was inoperable when we picked up the car in Sweden. (It comes pre-loaded with North American map data.) I input a destination, started it up and turned on the voice to hear it announce the route it had selected.
I put the car into gear and turned on the directional signal. While the system was announcing the route, I noticed that there was no turn signal clicking noise.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I gotta have my click. First, I thought it was some kind of manufacturing defect. The dash turn signal indicator was flashing and I assumed a brand-new car wouldn’t have burned out bulbs. Next, I thought, ugh, what a design miss. How could the engineers design out the clicking noise everyone relies on to know whether or not their turn signals are on?
In the time it took me to think it through, the voice announcement ended and voila! the clicking noise returned.
This astounded me even more. It means that the click must be digital…and it must be playing back through the sound system. As I considered this, I realized that the days of a fundamentally mechanical car are long gone. The old-school mechanical solenoid is obsolete. I remember when you used to have to fish up under the dash to find the turn signal solenoid when it failed. In the XC60, I’d need the source code for the infotainment system to find it.
This XC60 is a thoroughly digital device. It just happens to be an automobile. I suspect there’s more software is in this car than is in my DSLR or my iPad or my smartphone. Here’s a partial list of systems in the XC60 that are software-driven: radar and digital image processing to automatically brake the car if you get too close to a car in front, logic to permit the cruise control to automatically follow the car in front, ABS, DSTC, image processing to sense cars in blind spots and sensors in the shocks that can be set to deliver varying suspension rates. Clearly, the engine and transmission are digital, too (the car runs on regular or premium, so a knock sensor must be affecting the spark plug timing to prevent pre-detonation).
And I suspect my wife’s XC60 is to a Chevy Volt as an IBM PC XT of 1983 is to a Core i7 desktop of 2012. In short, as blown away as I am by this car, I’ll bet that hybrid and electric cars are even dependent on software.
So, bye-bye mechanical turns signals…hello, MP3 turn signal clicks.
I’m learning something, or actually re-learning, something fundamental about marketing: a new idea, a true breakthrough, won’t sell.
I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been talking to people whose job it is to follow/report/blog about software. And more than one has told me that I once worked on a very original product that, despite my best efforts to explicate it, confused them. (Why they waited until now to tell me is fodder for another post. You’d think the more outspoken tastemakers would have been delighted to express their opinions at the time, not ex post facto.)
I love highly engineered products. I also love new ways of doing things. I believe software can and should make it possible for people to do new things, things they haven’t been able to do before. But it’s not that way in the real world.
There, people like incremental changes. They like the familiar (though that begs the question of how the conventional got that way). They want to “get it” right away. They want to be like everyone else (I can’t tell you the number of blonde housewives I see in white Land Rovers with Sudbury High School stickers on the car, typing away in traffic on their white iPhone 4Ss). They want to be conventional.
You’re thinking, “Uh…light dawns on Marblehead. That’s pretty obvious, ain’t it? And, Alex, who cares?”
It matters because many software types believe that to be successful, you need a completely new idea. You can’t fund a company to build a “slightly better” product. To get investor interest, you need to convince them that you can displace an incumbent in a very large category, preferably a category with sales in billions of dollars. But, in reality, I am coming to believe that that’s what the dumb money funds. It’s probably better to fund a replacement for something people already know and hate.
Consider these two (fictional) software products. Then tell me which one you’d spend money on. Be honest. Calculate how much one or the other would change your world, the way you work. Consider having to deal with all the people around you with whom you interact and what would be required to really change how they all work. Decide how much of your day you wish to devote to exploring something new, unknown, different.
Product A:
- Stretches your understanding of how you work
- Has the potential to revolutionize the way you collaborate with your colleagues
- Is less focused on user interface than on managing interaction
Product B:
- Is familiar
- Is an evolution of software you’ve used for decades
- Looks like your favorite website
Bottom line: successful software products today are like a Philip Glass symphony: modern, but repetitive.
Truly inventive software ends up being something only its creators can love — because users today don’t really want innovation. They want to think they’re daring, in the vanguard, forward-thinking…but, really, they don’t want to change a darn thing.
If you follow my blog — and you know you should — you also know that I’ve been writing about cars a lot lately. It’s because I have mastered stretching the car buying process for as long as a year. Between research, taking delivery overseas and waiting for the car to be shipped home, that’s how long it can take me.
While that may seem like waterboarding to those of you who just buy one off the lot, and thank God that’s over!, I actually enjoy the elongated process because I learn so much more about the car that way. Plus, I can wait for the best price and, most importantly, making the process excruciatingly long means I’ll never become an impulse car buyer.
By the time we took delivery of Tricia’s new XC60, I’d learned that the car’s engine is made in a Ford plant in Wales, the transmission comes from Japan and the steel body parts are stamped at Torslanda, Sweden (pronounced in English, I think, like “tush-lander”). These and other useless bits of information plus a cover-to-cover reading of the online owner’s manual really do help cement the decision to buy a car.
For me, cars cost so much — and you keep them for so long — that it’s almost inexcusable to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a car that you haven’t become an expert on. After all, you can keep some cars almost as long as you keep your children. (I do realize how unfortunate that simile is, I really do. You try coming up with clever analogies. Post your alternatives as a comment and we’ll see which one(s) are more apt than the one I came up with.)
Anyway, Volvo has been doing overseas delivery for a long time. Long enough that in the distant fog of non-Internet time they felt it would be a good customer service idea to send a letter to a buyer letting him or her know when the car shipped from Europe and when it might arrive at the local dealer.
I received such a letter this morning. (Interesting, it came via email, so this customer service process has been updated somewhat for the Internet age.) You can see a redacted copy of the letter by clicking on the link at the end of this post.
Why is this old school? Well, for one thing Volvo generated a letter, not an email. That makes me think Volvo used to actually snail mail these out. I almost wish I’d gotten a letter postmarked Tushlander, Sweden. The footer is pretty interesting, too, eh? C’mon, how often have you gotten a letter from a car manufacturer with the bank wiring instructions for different currencies in the footer? Quaint.
But a letter like this is old school because it’s outdated. There are bazillion ways to track your car minute by minute as it crosses the ocean. For one, the shipper will give you a status update on its website, using your VIN as a tracking number. After all, if UPS can tell you where that package of gum is, why can’t a logistics company tell you where a freakin’ car is just as easily?
But the ne plus ultra of tracking is the many sites that combine cargo ship satellite transponders with Google Maps to give you the minute-by-minute location of a cargo ship. For example, the Platinum Ray, which has Tricia’s car on it, is in Southhampton in the UK at the moment. That’s its last stop in Europe on this voyage before it travels to Newark; Baltimore; Brunswick, GA and Charleston, SC on this side of the pond. By the time you read this, it may be on a completely different voyage. Still, you ought to check out this link, then click on “current vessel’s track” to see how precisely where this ship is. You may think me odd or impossibly geeky, but this is just too cool for words. I’m sorry; this is the balls.
But even though I can run technological rings around Volvo’s letter with up-to-the-minute news of where Tricia’s car is as it makes its way to her, I am even more impressed with the letter. It’s a nice touch, trying to keep the customer in the loop, not assuming the customer is technologically equipped to find the ship’s callsign and input it into a tracking site.
It may be old school, but it’s cool, too.
Well, it’s come to this: cheap, tawdry misappropriations of poetic metaphors.
Yesterday, something happened in my car that made it run rough and have no power. Come to find out today (thanks to an emergency visit to my pals at Village European) that the #4 ignition coil is dead. Prudence dictates that if one coil needs replacement, all should be replaced. And, since we’ve got the engine cover open, it’s advisable to replace all the spark plugs as well. (After all, who wants to spark a nearly dead plug? [And if you don't get that joke, I can't help you.])
Oh well…since you have the car, you might as well replace the front pads and rotors; there was only a few millimeters of surface left. All right…go ahead and change the oil, too, while you have it here. You know what? After the dealer aligned the car last spring, I couldn’t stand the way it drove, so do you mind also putting it on the rack?
To accurately describe the feeling one gets contemplating the cost of repairing a late-model BMW, I am forced to (mis)use the poetic term “mortal coil.” Usually, the term refers to the stress and frustrations of daily living.
Today, however, all I can think about is my BMW’s mortal ignition coils — they live fast and die young.
Everyone knows I am a big fan of BMWs; I’m already lusting after a new F30 3 Series, even though they haven’t been officially introduced into the US as yet. I especially enjoy seeing models we can’t get in the US when I am traveling. So, I am always on the lookout for unusual BMWs.
Well, I hit the jackpot this week. We were in Stockholm on December 6, 2011 to visit the Nobel Museum and its amazing Marie Curie exhibit. Behind the museum, I stumbled upon a mother lode of big, black BMW 750s with official decals and German (Munich) plates that were obviously being used to ferry Nobel laureates to and fro in Stockholm. As you may know, the Nobel Prize ceremony is always on December 10 — the day Alfred Nobel died. So I imagine these limos were taking people to the ceremony prep. Imagine being a laureate and being treated to a tour of Stockholm in these babies! (And, with the prize money, being able to afford to buy one!)
Click on the play button to play the little slide show in your browser, or click on an image to open the slide show in Picasa Web.
Greetings from Gothenburg, Sweden.
I’m writing this as Tricia catches a nap – she’s a little jet lagged. How jet-lagged? Well, she fell asleep in a tram while touring a car factory today. A very LOUD car factory. That, my friends, is jet-lag.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
It took us longer than we expected to get to Gothenburg. That’s because Tricia’s friendly travel agent (me) decided not to risk a short layover in Copenhagen. That added four hours sitting in an airport to the trip time. We arrived yesterday in a blinding, driven rain to discover that southern Sweden looks like (wait for it)…Portland, ME. Of course, we didn’t see much of the terrain because we arrived at about 1pm and it was already dark. OK, so I am exaggerating…but only a little.
In December, lights out is at about 3:30pm. And sunrise is about 8:15am. So, it’s a short day. However, today the rain ended and the sun came out. It was clear, brisk and cold – again, it was a lot like a nice winter day at home.
We got up early – for the first time in travel memory, I showered first so Tricia could sleep in another 30 minutes – had breakfast next to some Swedes complaining (in English, which everyone seems to speak) about their wives, their mothers-in-law, their teenage daughters– in fact just about everyone who’s female – and then were driven to the Volvo plant.
Before we get to the good stuff a word about Swedes: they’re tall (though not as tall as Finns, I think), many of them are blond and, among younger women, those that aren’t naturally blonde seem very much to want to be blonde, so there’s a plethora of platinum blondes walking around – something I suspect those practical Swedes think is useful. Is it that blonde hair reflecting more scarce light at night is desirable in a country with nearly perpetual darkness? Are blondes preferred so those guys from breakfast can find their women in the dark more easily? BTW, did I mention it gets dark early here?
[Update: Over dinner, Tricia mentioned that a woman sitting near us might be wearing a blonde wig. Later, we went for a walk, where, I kid you not, we saw these long, stringy blonde wigs for sale in the city's megamall. I can't believe the blonde envy thing going on here. Click the thumbnail to see these platinum fantasies full-size.]
Back to the narrative. Pelle from Volvo greeted us at precisely 8:15am and presented Tricia her car. The car is quite nice – and I breathed a sigh of relief after seeing the interior. We ordered, sight unseen, an interior that isn’t available on cars that dealers import into the US. I did it for two reasons. I couldn’t stand how monotone the US interiors are and it makes Tricia’s car a unique souvenir of this trip.
Tricia got to drive the car on the delivery center’s “test track,” which was a muddy stretch of earth about 700m in length. Volvo takes it history seriously — they claim one of the reasons the company was started in the 1920′s was to build cars that could take what were at the time poor paved roads in this country. So I suspect that even though highways here today are better than at home, this “test track” was built to demonstrate the spirit of the original Volvos.
After the test drive, we visited the Volvo Museum. There were some nice P1800′s in the collection. But what stood out is how the company’s history — and the depth of its collection — stops abruptly at about the year 2000. Why? It’s obvious — the company was nearly dead when Ford bought it in 1999 and today it’s the first major Western brand to be owned by a Chinese company nobody in the occident has ever heard of. As a monument to Swedish industrial prowess, the museum just couldn’t find a way to integrate its current history into the exhibition. I really looked hard for something that hinted at the company’s last 20 years; in fact I searched the entire museum. I found one reference to Ford (on a time line that stopped in 1999) and none — nothing at all — about Geely. The visit turned out to be a fascinating lesson in the power of museum curators.
Back to the delivery center for lunch — Swedish meatballs…surprised? — and then to the sleepy-time factory tour. I was disappointed because the stamping shop was idle. I wanted to Tricia to experience the earth-shaking pounding of floor-to-second-story metal presses stamping out car body parts. It’s my favorite part of a car factory tour because it’s the ultimate metaphor for a pounding headache — and the worst, I repeat worst, industrial job one could have. My heart goes out to people working in car stamping plants.
Anyway, Tricia must have known she got the quiet version of the tour and promptly fell asleep just as the Volvo tour guide got excited describing the marriage of body and powertrain. This was my second car factory tour and in the first one the tour guide was also hopped up over this “marriage” process.
I guess you just have to be there. But I don’t get why it’s so cool. It’s just another step in producing the car. In Volvo’s case, it’s done by robots; in the BMW plant I was in, it was being done by two mädchen who, at the time, looked marriageable. I assumed that in BMW plants, only young single women performed this task, so that’s why it is called ”marriage.” However, it appears to be an industry term — and those Swedes have ruined the metaphor for me by using (German) robots.
After the tour, we came back to the hotel, where I sat in Tricia’s car until it got too cold (and dark. Have I mentioned that it gets dark early in December in Sweden?) reading the 400-plus page owner’s manual.
Tricia went to our room for a nap…and I as write this, she’s happily catching up on her sleep, counting white Volvos in her sleep.
BTW, here’s a little video of stills from our day. Looks like we had fun, doesn’t it? We sure did.
Having done both BMW and Volvo deliveries in Europe, I gotta say that Volvo’s program is better, with two exceptions. First, they gotta replace their US travel agent. Second, I’d trade the two free map updates in the US for a pre-load of Scandinavian maps when the car is delivered. I brought an old GPS I’d loaded with Scandinavian maps (you really need it), but using an add-on GPSs in a new car cheapens the experience.
Biggest, most pleasant surprise? Volvo delivers the car with a full tank of gas, something that costs a small fortune with petrol costing about 14kr/liter.
I’m the geek my family and friends go to with their tech questions and for advanced support. If you want to do something more than just stare at your Android smartphone — like connecting it to your Office 365 Exchange account — or you want to get a game to run in a Windows virtual machine on your Mac, you call me.
Lately, the price of getting support from me has been a lecture about security and backup. Basically, I tell you that connecting your device to the Internet is so dangerous that unless you are (or want to become) a mega geek, with a deep technical understanding of things like TCP/IP and SSL, you should simply assume you are going to get killed online. Beaten…destroyed…instantly pwned.
I warn you with bone-chilling examples of how you, personally, have failed to be secure. It feels like an inquisition — my family hates it — but the process serves two purposes. First, family and friends don’t come to me unless they are truly stuck; they’d almost rather go off the grid completely than listen to my rant. As a result, I don’t have to actually do that much technical support. 
Second, I hope the shock value of it sinks in just a little and raises their security consciousness.
To be honest, the ‘net is too useful to give up. But I’ve observed most people are in such a rush to do whatever they want to do, no symphony of exhortations to “slow down, look at that URL in the address bar, make sure it’s a lock icon” or “take your time and read the message before you click OK” is ever going to make anyone more cautious about their online activities. So being absolutist — “There’s no way, none at all, for you to be safe online” — is the only message that has any effect. Once they hear from me that the Internet is an open, global security cesspool, they don’t forget the metaphor…it makes them more than just a little uncomfortable online. And that discomfort makes them act a little bit safer online.
But if you really wanna see someone break out in a cold sweat, remind them how much of their lives are in digital form today. Photos, music, tax returns, financial data: all of it increasingly lives on the hard disks of my family and friends. Many of them don’t even know what a hard drive is…how frail, how old-school mechanical it is. It’s amazing what behaviors this complete lack of understanding of the components inside a computer enables. People will steam vegetables next to a six-year old laptop sitting on the cooktop, then abruptly pick up the machine while it’s running and literally drop it onto a table or desk.
They just can’t understand why Windows won’t boot and they’ve lost everything — even their PhD dissertation – when their machines fail.
For a long time, I’ve included the topic of backup in the “digitally speaking, you’re naked from head to toe in a New England nor’easter” harangue. I ask them how it felt when a family member’s house burned to the ground with so many important mementos lost, including photos and heirlooms (true story). I tell them they must backup their machines on the cloud. And I tell them they have to do it religiously.
But the irony is that even I have been very, very lackadaisical about backing up my own stuff until very recently. I’d counted on a NAS in my basement for backup. Bad move, I know, but I’ve recently gotten religion about backup.
Shunning Carbonite and Mozy as being the equivalent of AOL dial-up, I defaulted to trying JungleDisk, now a product of Rackspace. I liked that I alone controlled the decryption keys and that it could use Amazon S3 storage. But using it was a disaster from the start. It was ungodly slow to upload. It doesn’t support (I don’t think) S3 server-side encryption. They charge, I think, for both upload and download from S3 even though if you upload something to an S3 bucket, the ingress transmission is free. I was willing to live with all that until a scheduled backup crashed and tech support simply stopped helping me after the usual bromides proved ineffective. This, from a company that has trademarked the term “fanatical support.” Bye, bye JungleDisk.
A quick Google search found CloudBerry. And, man is this thing cool. Yes, it requires you to set up your own Amazon account and find the access key and secret. But it’s fast, it’s attractive and best of all, Andy (who I suspect is the author) answers questions via email on Thanksgiving Day. It supports Windows volume snapshot services (VSS) so you can backup open files. A checkbox turns on both S3 reduced redundancy storage (which costs less) and server-side encryption. CloudBerry only charges you for the client; whatever costs you rack up on AWS are between Amazon and you. The only drawback I can see is that it stores your encrypted password locally to encrypt files on the way to S3 rather than allowing you to specify the public key to be used. But that seems minor to me, and compared the arrogance and lack of knowledge of Rackspace’s technical folks, I’d rather work with CloudBerry any day.
So, hello, CloudBerry. And, btw, if you are family or a friend and you want me to set CloudBerry up for you, sure thing. But the “Internet is a cesspool lecture” will continue.
Something big happened last weekend. I’ve waited until now to blog about it because I wanted to consider what to say publicly about reconnecting with three of my old Boston University college roommates.
Now, a week after dinner with Judson and Dana followed by drinks two days later with Judson and Nick (along with Nick’s lovely wife and Judson’s protégé), what I have to say is simple: letting us drift apart was a colossal mistake. (And what a mitzvah Judson performed to come all the way here from LA to pull us together.)
I learned a couple of things being with my old pals. First, we really don’t change. Nick, Judson and Dana are exactly what they were when we were buds in school. The same reasons I loved them then apply — in full measure — today. Gesticulations, ways of talking, the looks in their eyes — all precisely as I remember them. And, today they’re more of what they were then. These three guys have done what they’ve done, succeeded where they were successful and taken arrows where they weren’t, all of which has made them intensely more of what they were in college. Cognac comes to mind: as it ages, goop in the barrel evaporates (which causes a fungus that lives on the evaporate to form on the cellar ceiling. What a life, eh?) but the stuff left behind gains flavor all out of proportion to the original taste.
Second, age brings both wisdom and dimmed memories. I had completely forgotten that Dana and I had been both sophomore and senior year roommates. None of us seem to be able to remember the fifth roommate (Nick thinks his name was Ben, but who knows?). But we still remember the Third Annual Irish-Polish Lobotomy Picnic (though there were never any other picnics, before or after), singing in the stairwells and very specific professors and classmates. Collectively, our memories form the best history of our individual lives then — a reason in itself to stay connected to each other now.
Third, it’s too damn easy to let friendships go. This may be my particular failing. Sure, I am busy with a career, two kids, life in the ‘burbs. I used to travel all the time on business. I was gasping just to keep up with my job and my family. It’s been a 30-year marathon I suspect my pals are running, too. But I never lifted a finger to find these dudes, with the exception of a call or two to Judson five or six years ago. After you let friendship drift away, you convince yourself it doesn’t matter and then you just forget about it. But that’s like propofol, the black hole of memory, making you feel better about forgetting something central.
So, guys, I wanna work on it. Nick, Tricia and I definitely are coming there for hot dogs. Dana, you gotta come by on your way to Sunderland. Judson, we will come see you in LA one day soon.
Count on it.
Another day, another power outage, courtesy of National Grid.
Tonight, we lost power again. While we were out for only about an hour, the astonishingly unreliable National Grid distribution system has me thinking.
First, National Grid should be heavily fined and their management replaced. Tonight, when I called “customer service” to report our outage (it takes real effort to talk to a human — they’d rather not actually speak to customers), I got an earful of how heroic their response has been. Well, that may be the conventional wisdom inside that company. But here, in the real world, the consensus of everyone I talk with is that National Grid should be tarred, feathered and run out of town in one of their bucket trucks. National Grid is patting itself on its collective back while people continue to suffer and their repairs don’t hold. (It’s an interesting marketing problem — but that’s a topic for a different blog post.)
Second, the fury of the people — some 85K of whom are still lights out in the sixth day of this event — has reached our politicians. Governor Patrick has called for an investigation. Senator Brown has written a letter expressing the outrage of the common man. As National Grid owns the DPU (see regulatory capture), the former will accomplish nothing to improve National Grid’s mismanagement. And Senator Brown is burnishing his lunch-bucket, regular dude populist credentials in an effort to get ahead of the real populism of his apparent re-election challenger, Democrat Elizabeth Warren. A pox on all these politicos’ heads for their cynical (and ultimately ineffective) manipulation of these events for their own political objectives.
Third, I am reminded of the first time I went to India on business. It was 1995; I was working at Lotus Development. We were there to deliver a symposium for Notes application developers. I was just beginning the heavy international travel for business that dominated my career in the 1990s. I was naïve. In those early trips, I assumed that the world was like home: you could drink the water wherever you went and nobody ever thought about electricity supplies.
I remember visiting a Notes reseller on my first full day in Delhi, accompanied by our country marketing manager. We sat with the reseller’s managing director at the end of a long hall. Running down the spine of this hall snaked more than a dozen folding tables placed next to each other on their short sides like you might see set up for an event . On each side of the table were employees, working furiously on a variety of terminals — DEC VT101 compatibles, IBM 3270 compatibles and generic TTYs (all antiques today). This was the beginning of out-sourcing. I was told these people were doing contract programming for companies in the US.
All of a sudden, the power stopped. Nobody looked up. The fans stopped, the humming of the terminals stopped. It was silent. The programmers sat with their fingers curled at the ready over the keyboards of their terminals, eyes staring straight ahead at blank, dark terminal screens. Each programmer was in his or her own world, trying to remember where they were in the logic they were programming. They were at the ready, waiting for the power to come up in a few minutes — for just a couple of minutes. It was as if they, too, had been stopped dead by the power outage.
At our table, nobody missed a beat — except for me, the provincial dork. “Why,” I asked, “is everyone staring straight ahead, waiting to pounce on the keyboards? In a US office, when this happens, people push from their desk, laugh, talk sports and gossip until the power comes back on.”
“Not to worry,” I was told. “They are mentally paused at the last set of programming instructions just before they lost power and saved the items they were working on. They won’t remember as much if they relax and start talking. Plus, this happens several times a day. They’re used to it.”
And so it did happen, twice more in my hour meeting. I left astonished at the adaptation these programmers had to develop to keep their train of thought going during repeated, random power outages. They adapted by putting them minds into pause when power went out as a way of preventing re-work. It was my first taste of what happens to people who have to rely on third-world infrastructure.
Tonight, it’s a metaphor for what National Grid is doing to Southborough: they are pulling us backwards into the third-world, where we will all have to adapt, somehow, to an increasingly unreliable electricity supply. And that adaptation can only mean a step backwards for our living standards.
So, no, Governor Patrick, calling for an investigation won’t help. And, Senator Brown, you can save your franking privileges; it’s not going to do any good and it’s an utterly transparent political maneuver.
Instead, how about making DPU accountable for the third-world condition of our grid? Why not replace management there with new blood, people who have been explicitly charged with making sure National Grid is accountable for its failures? Why not put some teeth into this regulator to make sure that, one day, Southborough can once again rejoin the first world?
Since at least Mark Twain, people have accepted that crappy weather and New England go together. Now, thanks to UK-based National Grid (can you picture “British” and “advanced engineering” together or “UK” and “superior service” on the same bill?), “third-world power distribution grid” and New England have come to be linked in people’s minds.
In case you need a refresher, in August, 2011, Hurricane Irene blew through central Massachusetts and 400,000 plus National Grid customers lost power, some for almost a week. (We were out 37 hours.) In October, 2011, a nor’easter blew though Massachusetts and, surprise!, 400,000 plus National Grid customers lost power.
National Grid can’t control the weather. I understand that. But apparently, they can’t control their grid either. The same areas, in approximately the same proportions, were affected in both storms. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
A post-storm driving tour I took in August matched up perfectly with the tour I took today: cross from Southborough into Framingham and you move from no power to power. Cross from Southborough into Hopkinton, you get power. The difference? Hopkinton and Framingham are not National Grid service areas. How could the weather be so significantly different in those two communities from the weather in Southborough twice in 90 days? Answer: it can’t.
Worse, National Grid is repeating its ham-handed handling of pr with this outage. In August, I tweeted two screenshots from their outage website. One showed that after about 32 hours of outage, National Grid was still “assessing” the situation. Here’s the screenshot from their website for today’s outage:
Click to enlarge
It’s now 22 hours after the start of the outage in Southborough. And nobody at National Grid has assessed the conditions in Southborough yet? I and most of the town were out early today, cleaning up downed tree limbs and assessing our properties. I live off of Route 85 (on which there were no operable traffic signals). Does National Grid expect us to believe they couldn’t get a truck through the the heart of Southborough to determine the problems and use that info to update their website?
In August, 92% of Southborough lost power.
Remarkably, today 91% of Southborough lost power:
Click to enlarge
This speaks volumes to me. National Grid did nothing to improve its distribution network after the major outage resulting from Irene.
In public communications, National Grid continues to prefer bromides (“We’re working as hard as we can”) to actual information. I called the Southborough Police in August and today, asked what they’d heard from National Grid and got the same answer both times: “We have no information from them.”
I think the picture is pretty clear: a broken-down UK utility has bought up US utilities from New York to New England and operates them with minimal investment and maintenance in order to maximize profits. Meanwhile, they rely on the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities to continue to suffer from a classic case of regulatory capture to avoid having to operate and invest in the system in a way that would minimize disruption from severe weather.
It’s shocking that a public utility can away with repeatedly exploiting its customers, manipulating its regulators and avoiding accountability in crisis situations.
Recent Comments