Dim Bulbs

Last week not only did I receive correspondence informing me of my 10^th high school reunion (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!) but also a personally addressed letter to yours truly from the district supervisor of ConEd.

For those of you situated outside the confines of the Lower Hudson Valley of New York State, Consolidated Edison or ConEd for short, is the premier power supplier to the metro New York area and often performs that service to what could be generously described as very mixed reviews.

In any event, the letter began as such…”Mr. Carlino, we are aware that your neighborhood has been impacted by a number of power outages in recent months (only four but who’s counting?) and we are about to take certain steps to boost our infrastructure….”

Now it’s no secret that the New York area has been hit hard by weather the past two years – Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 and Hurricane Sandy just six months ago. I considered myself among the lucky ones during Sandy – my power was gone for just six days. There were others who did not get electricity back for a month. Not to mention the hundreds of poor souls whose homes were literally washed away in the Atlantic.

Needless to say, the aftermath of that system was not ConEd’s finest hour. I won’t bore you with the details, but let’s just say they were in no danger of receiving the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

But here’s the kicker. The top executives awarded themselves aggregate bonuses of $614,000 for their handling of Sandy. To put it in a public accounting perspective, it was akin to having 60 percent of a preparer’s tax clients undergo an audit due to shoddy work and said preparer asking for a few hundred extra.

In any event, the governor of New York has ordered an investigation into the matter and bluntly termed the utility’s post-hurricane response to Sandy “abysmal.” It should be noted that the CEO of the company scored a $315,000 payout in that largesse, lifting his annual compensation to $1.53 million.

ConEd’s rationale was, that Sandy was an unnatural occurrence and it was challenging to get the systems up and running. No doubt it was out of the ordinary. But just one year before, Tropical Storm Irene hit and blanketed the New York area with widespread outages and flooding damage. It appears the utility learned little from that or deployed any proactive measures in its aftermath.

A utility company’s competence  is rarely tested, nor are their emergency call centers flooded when it’s 75 degrees and sunny.

Ditto for preparers and this tax season, which by all reports, has morphed into one of the most frustrating and challenging in recent memory.

But I doubt that many tax practitioners immediately raised their rates by pointing to the frequent  IRS snafus, 11^th hour rule changes  and software glitches that occurred. Unless your return changed in its degree of complexity, it’s a safe bet that your 1040 fee remained pretty much the same as last year. I know mine did.

So I’ll wait until the next formidable weather system hits our area to judge the utility’s improved infrastructure.

But if I’m in the dark again for any length of time, I’ll prepare a letter of my own replete with some choice adjectives that will surely dwarf “abysmal.”