it'll get done when it gets done...

I just heard Bloomberg's live press conference in Astoria Park and was none too thrilled with his demeanor. I know he's a monotone guy but the complete lack of urgency was extremely frustrating. To keep describing the situation as an "inconvenience" is incredibly insulting. For me, as a young guy with little (if any) persishable food in my fridge yeah its just an inconvenience. No lights no TV no internet, no AC. Whatever-I can crash with my folks for a few days untill it blows over.

But for small business ownwers this is not an inconvenience, this is survival. They may not be million-dollar companies like Bloomberg LLC but they are businesses and these mom and pop shops are critical to the city's economy and they're suffering incredible losses. Along Ditmars Blvd, there are delis, groceries, bakeries and restaurants that are dumping crazy inventory (rotting food). One store owner in the NY Times reported that they looked into renting generators but the rental companies were price gouging them like crazy. Where is Bloomberg's leadership on this predatory pricing? Giuliani, in what was a symbolic, but important, move in the hours after 9/11, repeatedly said on the radio that he had inspectors on the streets to make sure no one was taking advantage of the crisis to price gouge. Basically, he told us that there would be order, there was infrastucture and we weren't going to descend into chaos. It was a small detail but it helped keep all of us calm. Impressively, he had the presence of mind to think of that in the first hours after the planes hit. The power's been out here for days, using his power to keep generator rental rates managebale should be something our fucking MBA CEO mayor should have figured out by picking up the damn paper. It might be the difference between some businesses folding or not.

"It'll get done when it gets done."

Bloomberg said this several times. What the fuck? There is no timetable? I understand that this is hard to predict and by avoiding a deadline he's trying to manage our expectations but I would venture a guess that Mike Bloomberg did not become a billionaire by keeping managers in his company that told him "it'll get done when it gets done." He should be lighting a fire under ConEd's asses right now. This is a mayorlty extremely committed to customer service, data collection and performance measures but all of a sudden he's got kid gloves? Tell ConEd to come up with a best-case, worst-case and a few in-between cases for when this will get done so they have some kind of fucking deadline. Instead he's just given them a license to dither. Give them a deadline. Use their data, how many manholes, estimate time per manhole, c'mon you put up fucking 311, demand more from ConEd than this.

He says doesn't want to point fingers right now or be confrontational. Right. Someone in Bloomberg LLP confuses 2,000 grossly mis-served customers with 15-25,000 and I want to see how CEO Bloomberg responds.

I understand it taking time, power usage is high, the storms are crazy but the city's leaden response starting with the mayor has reached the point where its inexcuseable. Its too bad its his last term so we don't have the satisfaction of voting his ass out.