Power outage

Well, the electric power has been out for, oh about an hour now. I'm able to do this because I have a UPS on the wifi and a battery in my laptop.

I tried calling the electric department at the city to get more information. They had the usual byzantine DTMF phone tree, which led to two recordings that said absolutely nothing whatsoever, except that there was a power outage. Which I knew, or I wouldn't have called in the first place. To quote Bill Murray in the movie Quick Change, "you could have been helpful, but you've been... so much more."

It's almost 2010. With all of the computer technology available, you want to tell me that when there's a power outage the utility has no way to know immediately where it is, at the very least?!