"Bob" wrote in message
...
On 6/18/2010 18:05, HeyBub wrote:
Power company came out today and replaced the old mechanical meter with
the
new fancy-schmancy one.

Chatting up the meter-man, I learned:

1. The old meters are going to be junked. Not sold to Mexico or Lithuania
like the 'phone company did with their mechanical central office stuff.
We're talking, oh, one million meters in a city of 5.5 million. That's a
pretty big pile.

There's not much of a market for such labor-intensive stuff.

2. His quota is 60-100 meters swapped out per day.

Yup. Just break the seal, take the old meter reading, pop out the old
meter, pop the new one in, seal it, and scan the bar code. Service is
interrupted just long enough to cause refrigerators to overload.

And all the TV's and devices to reset, and some cable channels off for a
half hour or so while the cable box reset. Mine was done on Tuesday, and the
power was only off about 20 seconds max. What was more irritating to me, is
that my meter is on the back wall outside, and he slammed the wall several
times during installation, causing 3 of my music boxes to come off the
shelves inside. One broke, but I was able to glue it back together. Ah,
progress.

Cheri