So this morning I was sleeping soundly, as I should be since it was about 5:45 am. I thought I heard a knock on the door. I laid and waited…. yup that was a knock. So I get out of bed, try to grab a sweatshirt, but before I can do that I hear a key in the door and the door opening. Good thing we put the chain on the door.

I yell: “Hello?”

“I’m the plumber, your neighbor called and said the heat was out. We need to check it out in your room.”

“Ok, hold on.” I’m somewhat skeptical at this point. It feels warm to me, but then again I did just get out of a nice warm bed. Of course Beth was awake at this point when I enter the room. She asks what’s going on.

“The heat’s out. Grab the phone and stay here, just in case.” I grab a sweatshirt, throw it on, and close the bedroom door on my way out. I walk to the door, and look through the peep hole.

“Do you have any I.D.?”

“No, only my work pager. But your neighbor says they have no heat and we need to check it in your room.” (We have hot water heat in our building, and aparently the pipes go through all three rooms in our part of the building, and some where there was a problem.)

Not really sure what to think I slowly open the door and let him in. He seems legit, but I’m not to easy about this. He looks around at the heat register, does some stuff, and says:

“Do you guys work tomorrow? It looks like I’ll have to come back and fix it then.”

At this point I start to notice the coolness of the place. So the heat really is out.

“No, we both have tomorrow off. But you can come back whenever.”

It took me a long time to get back to sleep. The adrenaline was still going through my system.

He leaves. 9 am I hear a knock again. As I roll out of bed, grabbing the sweatshirt, go to open the door.

“Oh, you guys are still resting.”
“Not a problem, if you could just give us 10 min we’ll be out of your way.”

We get up, and get ready. He comes back in 10 minutes to fix it.

He says, “I talked to my manager this morning and told him about the I.D. idea. It’s a good one, cuz at 6 am you don’t know what’s going on, especially when you hear a knock on the door. I thought this apartment was vacant still, and when you hear some one coming in like that, it’s not a good situation.” (The building we’re in doesn’t have many people in it, it seems.)
I thought to myself: that’s right, you don’t want me to go all Jack Bauer on you or anything.

“Yeah, that’d be a good idea. We just moved in a month ago, so we haven’t been here long.”

He fixes the heat, and we get back to our day.

It looks like St. Paul is planning on putting a fiber optic link for the entire city.  The plan seems strange to me, but I could see it being really nice.  There are some ups and downs to the plan though.

One thing I’m not sure of is the free market competition and how that would work.  I think the city might not gain much from it, but if it drives prices down then it’s a win for the consumer which is great.

The price tag on the project is pretty large though: nearly $300 million.  And would fiber be a whole lot better than wireless?

Any thoughts?