I rode the Arroyo path again today. This time the stream was lower, and a lot clearer, but not yet back to its normal level of transparency. The “stream of sludge” was pretty worrying for a while.

Today the Arroyo Seco stream was dirtier than I’ve ever seen it. The water was fairly high, a little more than yesterday, but while yesterday the water was clear, today it was nearly black with sludge.
What happened? The radio news had the answer — there’d been some mudslides upstream, which apparently dumped tons of silt into the stream.

So, a little before 8:50 this morning, all my connections hung. Fire up mtr, and it doesn’t reach the first hop. I pick up the phone, and there’s no dial tone! I futz around for a while, but by 9:00 there’s still no phone service. I go outside and down the ¼ block to the AT&T switchbox, and there’s an AT&T truck there and a tech messing around with it. I ask him if he’s fixing the outage, and he says no, he’s measuring the noise on the wires. I say I lost my service 10 min. ago, and after getting my phone number he confirms that he pulled my wires along with a bunch of others then. With me standing around, he measures my line next and reconnects it.

WTF? How is it that this is a company which is synonymous with reliability in its reputation? A deliberate, unannounced outage, not during off-peak, and for much longer than need be just because it’s easier to pull all the wires, measure, then reattach than to do them one by one? And I was very lucky this time — last time I lost my phone it took them two days to send a tech out to confirm that the last tech to mess with the switchbox had screwed up my wiring and fix it.