Tell them you caught a pedophile.

/for the kids

Gimme a break. An old guy yelling at people on the phone is hardly reason enough to go ahead and arrest him. They do that all the time.

AverageAmericanGuy: Gimme a break. An old guy yelling at people on the phone is hardly reason enough to go ahead and arrest him. They do that all the time.

They didn't arrest him for that - they arrested him for going down to city hall and reiterating his threats. The old man saw a problem - he needed power in his domicile and it wasn't there. He called city hall to do something about it. Problem not solved. He made threats in person at city hall. His domicile now has power. Problem solved. Brilliant.

A neighbor of mine did this sort of thing years ago. No threats except for a lot of calling City Light and yelling at them, after a particularly nasty wet snowstorm followed by a deep freeze that coated everything with heavy ice and brought down a lot of power lines around the City. He spent two whole days without power and ranted about "socialist power companies" for years afterward.

He was quite literally the nasty old fat man who sat on his front porch and screamed at the kids riding their bikes or walking past his house on the sidewalk and running around the neighborhood. He called the cops so often that he became a neighborhood joke, and everyone told their kids to stay away from "that crazy old man."

He's probably a Teabagger now.

I work with furnished apartments, and I can tell you some percentage of people just go totally retarded when the power is out and their little lives are inconvenienced by it. With my customers the wealthier they are, the more likely they are to be irrationally demanding about it.

Numerous times I've had the power go out to a neighborhood I have people in and a few minutes later they're on the phone chewing us out and demanding that we restore power to their apartment at once. We just have to calmly remind them that we have no control over the power company, that the problem is not limited to their apartment alone, that everyone will get their power back in their neighborhood at the same time regardless of how either of us feel about it, that we will simply need to wait for the utility company to get their work done and that nothing either of us can do or say will be able to speed the process up in any way.

Most of the time they calm down after they get it off their chest, but a few here and there get more aggressive and insist that we do "something". I ask them what they would like me to do and universally they start to stammer and I can almost hear their faces turn red and every last one says, "I don't know - SOMETHING" as if them simply wanting something is supposed to make it happen.

Be glad none of you live in Florida nor have to deal with irate, irrational old farts with nothing better to do. Or even worse, live in a community full of them.

It gets really fun when they start rambling on about how old they are, or what they've done in life, or what medical conditions they have -- as if that'll make a difference as to the process the linemen go through to restore power. No matter what, it's the same -- restore the main feeds, then the secondary, tertiary, etc. Connecting up the old fart's downed powerline to a dead street feeder isn't going to do any good.

I usually remind these people that if power is THAT important to them, there's no shortage of contractors in this area who install generators. I have one...and get the idiot neighbors calling every time the power goes off :
"Do you have power? No. Then why are your lights on? I have a generator. Oh."

And three meals a day

/so I hear

My neighbor did this too years ago back in Nebraska. There was a huge ice storm and a good portion of Omaha was out of power (in '97 I believe). I'm not sure what happened to him, but I know since we shared a power pole with him that we were one of the last people to get our power turned back on. 9 days without power in October / November really sucked. Coincidentally that was when I decided to move to Phoenix. In summary: Winter sucks, and so do people.

/csb

A similar incident happened with us last Monday. Only our guy is also a certifiable loony tune. He kept asking us to come out to his address to inspect an "environmental issue," but when the inspector went to his house, he wouldn't come to the door even though he was at home. "I don't open my door to anybody, but I do sit in my chair with a gun in each hand in case somebody tries anything." He giggled like a twelve year old schoolgirl while he was saying this.

Did we have him arrested? No. He didn't really do anything that could be proven in a court of law. Kinda wish we could've arrested him, because I had to spend the next three hours notifying everybody that might possibly come into contact with him. Should a deputy serve him with papers, or a dog catcher cross his lawn, or the water guy hang a notice on his doorknob and he actually follows through on his veiled threat, I would never forgive myself.

I live in an area near by and didn't have power from Wed-Sat afternoon. You know what I did? Went out one night. Okay, maybe he's an old man and can't/doesn't want to do that. The other thing I did was...read during the day. Go to bed early. Out of all the utilities to go out, power doesn't rank as high as water and everyone still had that running. That and a gas powered hot water heater.

/there's still some houses without power in my town
//that's what happens when power poles fall down