As you may or may not know, for more than 30 years now the local Claridge

clan has had an address in Mono although the house on Golden Road is within walking distance of Orangeville's town limits.

Since Mono has never had its own electric utility, our house and all the others in the Cedar Grove subdivision get their electricity from Hydro One, the publicly owned successor to the distribution wing of Ontario Hydro.

Over the years, the service has been pretty reliable, although there was one area-wide blackout in an early April that lasted more than a day and there was also, of course, the Great Blackout of August 2003 when just about everyone lost power for upwards of a day and we were being urged to use as little as possible for the next couple of weeks.

Still, just in case, we do have a lot of candles and a few functioning flashlights in the house, and last Wednesday night most of them were in use.

The power failed shortly after 8, just as we were settling down to watch a video in the family room.

Since there was still plenty of daylight, we had no difficulty finding the candles and flashlights, and I went downstairs to get a small battery-powered radio to see what we could learn about what we assumed was another area-wide blackout.

A Barrie FM station that usually has little more than rock music was taking calls from all over and it soon seemed fairly obvious that the power outage was, indeed, a major one. Callers had reported power losses from as far off as Owen Sound and Gravenhurst, although at that point no one had called from anywhere in Dufferin.

As the evening wore on, the radio news reports were of high winds, possible tornados and a lot of downed power lines, with at least 100,000 Hydro One customers said to be without electricity.

With no air conditioning, the house was getting a bit uncomfortable, and since the rain had stopped we decided to open a few windows before hitting the hay.

I happened to wake up at about 3 a.m. and discovered that the power was still off.

Concerned that a longer outage would create problems due to the lack of refrigeration, I decided the best idea would be to call Hydro One and find out how soon our part of the world would get its power back.

A check with the Bell directory showed that in the event of "emergencies and outages," Hydro One had a toll-free line, 1-800434-1235.

Dialing it, all I got initially was a university switchboard in Illinois, but on the third attempt the call did go through to what I later learned was Hydro One's state-of-the-art Call Management System (CMS), alias Hal the Computer.

After a few minutes' frustration at dealing with a voice-recognition system that didn't want to recognize my voice, I determined that there was absolutely no way I could ever learn when the lights would be back on, or even if Hydro One was aware of our particular outage.

Three hours later, while out walking the pooches, I discovered to my astonishment that the traffic signals at Highway 10 and Hockley Road were operating!

On returning home I grabbed the keys to daughter Nancy's Dodge and headed out to the Orangeville Transformer Station in Amaranth, where I figured there was a better than-equal chance of finding a real, live Hydro One body.

Sure enough, I spotted a friendly lineman who was heading into the area office and told him I strongly suspected we had a local outage that no one had been able to report in any meaningful manner. (All anyone could do is tell Hal the Computer that there was no power in their own home.)

Sure enough, the power was back on within the hour, and a couple of hours later Hal called back to advise that power had been restored "to most of the homes in your area" and ask you to push 1 if you had power and 2 if you didn't.

Al Manchee of Hydro One's communications office assures me that the utility wants to be customer friendly and would appreciate any advice I might offer.

Well, here it is:

1. Modify the CMS to introduce at least one more option for callers: "Hit (number) if you want to leave a message alerting us to a problem we may not know about."

2. Return to publishing the numbers of local area offices so customers can at least have the satisfaction of being able to leave a voicemail.

3. Fire Hal.