For as long as we’ve lived at our apartment, we’ve had irregular
power outages. Sometimes we get notices from NStar about planned
“service upgrades,” but about 90% of the time we don’t. Generally the
power goes out between the hours of 1 and 3 a 15-minute stretches.

The situation is quite annoying because it causes all the clocks to
reset, and in particular it drives the UPS backups on our computers
nuts. (I need to figure out how to disable their audible alarms).

Today I talked with “Cathy” at NStar customer service, and an
engineer should be getting back to me. If this continues I am going to
start talking to our neighbors to identify what actions we can take.
Certainly these outages are only nuisances when compared with, say, the
power situation in Baghdad, but, like I said, it’s annoying.