I know what you mean. Not having power is totally debilitating. Same for other utilities, though perhaps not always quite as much. (( Composed while Andi was writing the above response ..))
Two winters ago we had 80-90 mph winds that knocked out power in lots of places in AZ. Ours went out completely for eight hours one night. Fortunately we could turn on the gas stove and heat the house with it, even though it's a sizable house. (One of the advantages of a Viking Range... ) The total outage was repaired, then half the power went out. We called the power company daily, told them half our power was out. And they said "We already fixed your power. It's your breaker." Finally on the fifth day they sent someone out at 10:30 pm.
"Yup," he said. "You don't have power. And it's not your breaker. It's the power meter. One of the lugs isn't making contact. We can have it fixed in a coupla days, but in the mean time we have to turn off all the power to your house. Safety issue."
"Sorry," we said. "We need to do something else. It took you guys four days to show up. So,
1) Power meter will be installed tomorrow morning.
2) What power we have will remain on until then.
Otherwise, we move to a hotel for the duration and back-charge you for the cost of the stay. If leaving the power on now is a safety problem, it was for the preceding five days when you guys didn't show up."
So he left the power on, and the next day they fixed it.
We keep an old land-line phone plugged into the wall. While we've replaced all the newfangled wireless phones four times with the best-rated phones we can find, that old tank just keeps going and going. One of those expensive but reliable products of a regulated telephone era.
My impression is that electrical power has gotten more and more unreliable since deregulation a couple decades back. During my first twenty years of life I don't recall ever losing power. Ever. Even during four years in Zambia. The city-owned utility in Austin may have been a little pricey, but it never failed to deliver power in the decade I lived there.
Reliability doesn't have to be this bad. It's this bad because of choices we've made. Sometimes, when it comes to utilities, I wish we could elect to spent a little more and get the reliability levels of the mid-twentieth century (excluding those several monumental brown-outs of the sixties, of course).
