A Good Faith Effort

”This is a good faith effort to acknowledge the inconvenience of extended outages,” said PG&E Spokesman David Eisenhauer on Friday. Whatever. What PG&E does with their money is their business...or is it?

I guess I shouldn't have anything to say about PG&E giving back rebates for the inconvenience of extended outages. It just irks me that it probably gives a lot of people the idea that a power outage was PG&E's fault. Even if an outage is PG&E's "fault", I still wonder about assigning them liability.

Years ago, there was a large outage in San Francisco. It turned out the cause was some lineman doing something wrong that caused an improper ground, or some such, and a major part of the city was without power for a few hours.

I believe it was Mayor Wille Brown that either filed suit, or threatened to file suit, because of all the money businesses lost as a result of the power outage. I say that's nonsense. PG&E lost money, too. Shit happens. You don't have a right to power 24/7. Sometimes the power goes out.

I don't like the idea that just because something isn't always perfect, and we're faced with some inconvenience- even major inconveniences- that someone should always be held responsible and have to pay up. Besides, it's not like customers were paying for power they didn't get to use. Their electrical meter stopped running when the power went out.

If PG&E wants to play the nice guy and toss out some free money, they can have at it. But let's hope this doesn't add fuel to the liability fire.