Typical Duquesne Light Employee.

I can easily attribute 99% of the downtime of this site to the inept fashion that Duquesne Light runs their company. Despite my attempts to combat the electric companies seemingly deliberate attempts to sabotage their own power grids I still have to contend with my severs inexplicably shutting down about twice a month. While the 20 minute life of the battery backup I purchased does it's job for all of the one second outages that Duquesne Light sends my way to keep my clock resetting skills as sharp as they can be, it doesn't help when they decide that I should spend a few hours in pitch blackness trying to find a flashlight or a candle.

I would have thought that a company formed in 1903 would have had ample opportunity to perfect their product, but the wheels turn slow at Duquesne Light much like their electric turbines which are still being hand driven by the same indentured Irish immigrants that were brought in as cheep labor when the company was first established. I've been considering moving my server to Baghdad as they can easily tout a more reliable power service than my neighborhood can.

It wouldn't bother me as much if there was a discernible reason for these outages. I can understand if there is a thunderstorm with high winds causing a Duquesne Light employee to panic, lose control of his vehicle and slam into a telephone pole, but every time one occurs the air is as stagnant as the mold growing in asskickergod's butt crack. So being the fair and balanced news reporter I am, I contacted Duquesne Light and asked for an explanation for the last few outages I experienced. As I expected they tried to blame the outages on everything from the economy to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, however I did some "investigative reporting" to find the real reasons behind them.

Gang violence is on the rise.

• There is a roughly nine billion to one squirrel to human ratio in my neighborhood. They come in three colors brown, gray and black. The brown squirrels easily outnumber both the gray or "Latino" squirrels and the black or "Black" squirrels. Since these two minorities are oppressed by the white man squirrels they are forced into the poorer neighborhoods where they naturally form gangs to better protect their "turf". An outage was caused when a gang war erupted between these two factions over a walnut tree and a Latino squirrel got shot and fell into an electrical transformer. But the question you have to ask is, "Where were the police during all of this?" There's just never a squirrel cop around when you need one and that's why when I see a squirrel or anyone wearing a Duquesne Light uniform in the street I don't break.
  
  
• The next incident happened on bring your daughter to work day. Since Duquesne Light employees live in trailer parks or caves and breed in litters you can imagine this is a pretty chaotic day down at the power station. While a particularly large herd was touring an upper level of the plant the platform they were standing on gave way and a number of them fell into a turbine, clogging it with the ample fat deposits they had stored in their cheeks. It took roughly seven hours to figure out how to reposition the various colored shapes on their control panel to divert power from another generator.
  
  
• Pittsburgh happens to be along the migration path for the pterodactyls that escaped at the end of the real and completely true documentary Jurassic Park 3. When one of these flying reptiles lands on a power line they often break under their weight since most of the cables are fastened to the poles with Scotch tape or the same "lick and stick" method I use when putting a postage stamp on the exorbitant bill that Duquesne Light sends me every month for the five electrons that actually made it to my house.

Duquesne Light uses a Trial and Error methodology when doing line testing.

OK, so maybe I made that shit up, but I can pretty much guarantee that the explanations I can come up with are far more believable then whatever could be going on at Duquesne Light. I might not know everything there is to know about electrical grids, but I know that most electric companies design their grids to have some redundancy. We don't have anything like that here in Pittsburgh. In fact our electrical grids can be shut down by the distant gravitational pull of Russell Crowe's ego.

It's as if this city's power grid functioned like a giant string of Christmas tree lights where if one light bulb anywhere in the city burns out an entire power grid immediately shuts down. Then they send out four of their mentally handicapped employees to begin the trial and error process of going home to home unscrewing bulbs and screwing in new ones to locate the burnt out one. Of course the bulbs aren't the only thing getting screwed during this process.