Our power went out yesterday for a little over an hour. Being the kind of twirp that I am, I checked National Grid's website. It turns out that they have a website that tells you if your power is out. There is a website to tell you if you do not have electricity. Also, the website does not work on my smartphone, which is the only possible way I can think of to visit the website if your power is out. So if you are interested in the information on this website, you are by definition unable to access it. This is funny, right? So I tweeted it.

true fact: national grid has a website to tell you if your power is out. true fact 2: it doesn't work on phones.

So it turns out that National Grid has a cyberstalker on Twitter, who is probably actually a real person but I sort of doubt that her real name is Emily. And Miss Emily Grid kind of didn't get the humor of the situation but I'm okay with that.

@zobar2 Yes, we do have an outage website at We also hope to integrate outage info on Twitter.

Reading the other tweets she responded to today, it probably caught her off-guard that I was being a small noodge rather than a huge dickhead. But that's kind of besides the point, really. What's more important is what kind of a middle-management knob would think it's a good idea to cyberstalk your own customers? It's creepy! I don't want to live in a world where you can't complain about the electric company without hurting poor Emily's feelings.

- Z

Am I the only person in the entire universe who received a reasonable science education from parochial schools? Miseducating children so egregiously really ought to be a crime, but is this really becoming the norm rather than the exception?



- Z

An actual dialog box that I actually got when logging into one of my company's actual servers.



- Z