Queens boro power problems

This story hasn't been on the national news, so most of the country doesn't know that some neighborhoods in one of NYC's five boroughs have been suffering without power for the past week. Con Edison has been going manhole by manhole to fix the problems, which have to do with underground feeder cables. Apparently it's not a capacity problem, but a delivery one. The trouble is that even when Con Ed has restored power to some customers, it goes out again when it rains or when the manholes catch on fire. Gawker pointed out this story from a frustrated Queens resident who saw a manhole fire early Sunday morning. All I can say is that if I were living in one of the affected neighborhoods, I'd have turned into a marauding Visigoth by now. As a geek whose many entertainment options rely on electricity, I don't enjoy power outages. And a week without power during a heat wave would be enough to drive me over the edge. Some of my readers know how nasty I can be when I'm aggravated at work. Just imagine me like that all the time, except I'd be wielding my dead Blackberry like a club as I fought my way onto an air-conditioned subway car.