Out of Power
Eleven atmospheric rivers later, I am now seven-going-on-eight nights without power. PG&E can’t restore it because the ground is too wet for the necessary equipment trucks to rest on the forest floor, where the engineers of yesteryear determined was the best place to run the major transmission lines to our area.
But today, the county decides to issue my generator permit — after the last storm has passed. Our generator has been sitting in the contractor’s warehouse for three months waiting patiently in its box to be installed.
The new back-up battery that manages our electric blinds is drained after one draw. Our best option to get sunlight in a power outage is inexplicably inoperable.
Three massive trees fall; they all have the courtesy to avoid our home. Our brand-new fence was not so lucky, but I’m thankful. This is a first-world problem and it is not my fault mother nature is so angry right now that COVID was not enough. The trees all around a few-mile radius have fallen like pick-up sticks, and it looks like Mount St. Helens after its eruption. Its staggering, but that takes me back to day seven of my latest outage and the 10 others that have happened since mid-December! We have stopped counting.
Somehow the powers that be in certain counties in my silly state have determined that we must drive electric vehicles, cook on electric stoves, have electric fireplaces (what are those anyway?), and, I’m sure some day, have electric-powered money. Yet no one has thought about the fact they are stranded by the powers that be except Elon Musk if you can afford to buy his technology when it becomes clear there is not enough power to go around — certainly not after 11 atmospheric rivers. We will be hostage, and I can’t tell if anyone sees that coming. It’s downright craziness.
To make matters worse, this week Salesforce has decided to ram its way onto my iPhone and everyone else’s in our company — presumably every company it serves — because mobile phones are now public property at the whim of every major platform that decides it’s time to usurp our space so we can be so blessed by their multi-factor authentication.
Suddenly two-factor authentication isn’t good enough. If we want to access what we licensed, we can’t effective the 16th. No opt out. Nada. I wish to take my entire company off this beast of a platform (its user interface is so yesterday) but figure every other relationship management software is moving this direction.
And now, First Republic Bank just locked me out. Every week I approve checks; it takes about five minutes. Today the log in didn’t work. My head of finance says I need a token. We weren’t notified. No “Dear Ms. Valued Customer.” Again, nothing. No word about this on the login page either. Last week, I logged in and approved checks fine. Every week before that too. Today, nope. Suddenly my bank is insisting their app be on my phone so I can have a token to get into my account and access our money.
To top it off, I had a Zoom call at 8:45 on the address I always use, linking from my Outlook, and that, too, stopped working. I rebooted, retried, logged back into Zoom, and nothing. So I asked a colleague to use their address for a client call so we didn’t leave them hanging. And here’s what he says:
This happened to me yesterday. Microsoft killed the plugin on the Zoom side, you can only set up a call from within Outlook now. You can’t set it up in Zoom and push it to Outlook anymore. They did this for security reasons, they said.
Suspended disbelief…. Once again, no notice, no “Dear Ms. Valued User…”
And my iPhone has gone on strike and refuses to sync my calendar with my laptop today. Maybe the world has turned on its axis. The technology gremlins are taking it one step too far. I’m angry about this.
While the world is protecting us from ourselves, the banks threaten to melt down while no one watches. As my colleague David Worlock says, everyone knows when interest rates go up, bond holdings go down. Why are we acting like Silicon Valley Bank going belly-up is a surprise? It seems the regulators weren’t watching or our industry’s risk software got it wrong or was downright ignored. Refinitiv, S&P, Moody’s — what happened? Just two weeks ago KPMG gave a clear audit to Silicon Valley Bank. Regional banks weren’t put through the same stress tests even though what was happening was in front of God and everybody to see.
But Salesforce, First Republic, and now Microsoft and Zoom are saving us from ourselves.
As information technology runs amok, Silicon Valley hubris strikes again. The big get bigger. The little guy’s power gets chipped away — whether it’s our ability to light a stove in our home, take money out of our bank accounts, or keep our cell phone real estate ours.
It appears no one is concerned by the insanity of it all. But thank God my local county has moved after three months of Noah’s Ark–like storms and issued a permit. The powers that be are taking our power in plain sight.