Three doors down, a neighbor's garage door ground to a stop halfway up, stuck there. Someone in the street called out, confused. A dog started barking. Margaret didn't flinch.
"You should have paid the fine when we sent it," she said, watching her crew close their cases. "This community has standards. The HOA has the authority and the obligation to enforce them. That's not personal, Mr. Mills."
I wrote down the time, 7:21 a.m., September 14th. I wrote down her exact words. "The HOA owns all utility infrastructure serving this community. We don't need a county permit."
She said both things with the confidence of someone who had actually looked them up, as if she understood what was on the other end of those lines, as if she knew what she'd just cut. She didn't. I photographed the truck, both men, the work order, the HOA logo on the polo shirt, the license plate on the FastCut vehicle. I did all of this without hurrying, one frame at a time, quiet as she was.
"Is there anything else?" Margaret asked. "No," I said.
"I think I have everything I need." By 7:29 a.m., the driveway was clear. My house stood dark and quiet behind me. My neighbor's garage door was still frozen at half-mast.
I stood at the edge of my own property, holding work order 2241 in both hands. I thought about the filing cabinet in my office, the one with the 15-year franchise agreement inside it, the one that granted Ridgecrest Power Services LLC the exclusive licensed authority to supply and maintain every inch of utility infrastructure serving all 96 homes in this development, including the panel FastCut Electrical had just cut. I thought about the 30 years I'd spent building that company. I thought about the fact that Margaret Chen didn't know that company existed, didn't know its name, had no idea who its owner was.
She had handed work order 2241 to the wrong man. She had no idea that the person she just pressed that document against was the same person whose signature sat at the bottom of every utility franchise agreement this county had ever issued for Ridgecrest Meadows. She just thought she was dealing with a homeowner who would fold. A lot of people had made that mistake.
I went inside. No power. House warm and still. I sat at the kitchen table, work order flat in front of me, and called my attorney.
What Margaret Chen didn't know, what not one person watching from their driveways that September morning understood, was that the power lines her crew had just cut ran through a company I had spent 30 years building. Every wire in Ridgecrest Meadows, every meter, every home, mine. I moved to Ridgecrest Meadows 4 years ago because I knew the neighborhood better than anyone living in it. That sounds like a strange thing to say about a suburb.
Let me explain. Ridgecrest Power Services LLC, the company I founded in 1991 and spent 30 years building into a regional utility provider, had held the exclusive franchise agreement to supply electricity to this development since before the first family moved in. 15 years of service contracts. 15 years of maintenance logs, circuit maps, infrastructure filings.
I knew the layout of every power line in this development better than I knew the floor plan of my own house. When I semi-retired, I wanted somewhere quiet. I chose a lot I already owned in a neighborhood I already served. I didn't put my name on a sign.
Nobody needed to know. It never seemed like it would matter. For the first 2 and 1/2 years, it didn't. Ridgecrest Meadows: 96 single-family homes, 12 miles outside the city off Route 9.