The Middlemen

I recently had a conversation with one of my loyal customers of my communications business. They have a main office and two satellite offices, one of which uses dial tone from the main office via IP telephones on the system at the main office. They had moved this remote IP office over to another nearby building in an office park in which they own two of the several buildings. The IP phones were working just fine, that is until they experienced power problems at the new building. The IP phones went up and down several times after midnight one day and this caused the fault buffer in the phone system at the main office to quickly fill up. When the fault buffer filled up, the operating system performed a stack dump which causes a forced rebooting of the system. So the frantic service call that I received was that "Our phone system keeps going down and coming back up repeatedly".

After a few questions I surmised that tech support from the equipment manufacturer was warranted. With tech support on the phone, I had them dial into the switch and have a look at what they could find out. When they told me that the fault buffer was causing the system to reboot on account of extensions 124 and 126 going up and down repeatedly, I knew instantly what the problem was; bad power at the IP office location.

I had the maintenance person at the customer's location unplug the phones until he could procure a couple of UPS for me to put in line with them. After completing the service call, I called the customer back and explained that the real culprit was bad power.

You see, I had worked at Detroit Edison for several years as a contractor in the metering department and a few more in the communications department. I was there before and during the deregulation of the utilities industries and have made a few key observations about it all.

What was supposed to bring increased "choice and competition that would result in lower costs and better service for consumers" has in fact done neither. In fact, quite the opposite has happened. You see, Detroit Edison, which was founded by none other than Thomas Edison himself after he left Ford, used to own the entire process from start to finish. They owned the power generation, power transmission, metering and collections. But with the deregulation that was foisted upon them, they were forced to give up something. They chose to sell off the power transmission part of their enterprise to a company called ITC Holdings Inc. based in Novi, Michigan. Not that I have anything against ITC per Se, ( I actually have a cousin on my Dad's side that is a Linesman there) but having two many chefs in the kitchen spoils the stew. And now after this forced deregulation we have lousy power all over the region that regularly fries sensitive digital electronic business telephone systems. My customer experienced this firsthand a few years back.

And then there is the constant assault on our front door by all the young sales types with clipboards in hand hawking the latest and greatest way for me to purchase energy. There is one who tells me that I can shuck the evil gas company and just pay them instead and they will guarantee that my gas rates will not change for the next five years. I usually ask them if they also guarantee that if the rates should go down, would they as a middle man pass that savings along to me or other consumers? No thanks, I'll take my chances with the original supplier of my energy. And then there is the one who uses green energy as a marketing tool. Like I or anyone really stops and thinks about how the energy we use gets there as we push the button on the remote for our big screen televisions, or flip the light switch, get a cold drink out of the fridge, or make coffee or toast in the morning. Green is nothing more than a marketing tool. Ask Tipper Gore about that one, Oh, that's right she won't be a "Gore" much longer. Guess that she got fed up with the hypocrisy too.

I liked it much better when the only assault or intrusion that we had to tolerate was on the phone. That was handled easily by technology like caller ID or privacy blocker. No, now we have actual people stalking our front doors with clipboards, pens and name tags to look official that try to convince us that we are unwise to play roulette with the evil power companies on our own. We need them to moderate our prices for us because we are so busy and uneducated about the whole process. Folks, we wouldn't have a process to contend with if it wasn't for our lousy government sticking its damned nose where it does not belong; in our business, in the first place!


I feel rather sorry for those fools who carry the clipboards around. I figure that they got suckered into that job because they needed the money that badly since they probably have been out of work for so very long. But I do not feel sorry enough to abandon all reason and add another middle man into the fray between me and suppliers of the energy I use. Adding a middle man into any business transaction will only increase costs for the end consumer.

Sometimes, the wheel is just fine like it is; you don't really need to reinvent it. All it does is turn round and around regardless so why try to mess with it?