Pacific Gas & Electric has filed for bankruptcy, crippled by the likelihood the utility will have to pay billions for deaths and damage in recent California wildfires. And then there’s the bill for fires in 2017 that the company’s creaky infrastructure has also been blamed for. A judge overseeing the company excoriated it last week for what he called a “clear-cut pattern” of starting fires.
PG&E was a happier place the summer I interned there, years ago, working in the regulatory affairs shop. To be honest, “working” isn’t the right word. “Loafing” is more like it, and extravagant loafing at that.
The company treated its interns ridiculously well. For starters, they paid. And they put me up in an apartment on Nob Hill, a half-block from the Mark Hopkins hotel. Leave it to a heavily regulated utility to treat its interns to a months’ long vacation in the swankiest neighborhood in town.
And what a vacation it was. At the office I did nothing: My first day on the job, the utility commission rejected PG&E’s request for a rate increase. Everyone hunkered down in their offices to rewrite the request, a task that would take months. I just stayed out of their way. As far as they were concerned, this made me an exemplary intern.
To get a little air, I would go out for coffee a couple of times a day. This was before there was a Starbucks on every corner. Instead, there were gleaming copper and chromium barista carts on the sidewalk with the best coffee I had ever tasted. I would sit in my office — yes, they gave me an office, with a desk, a door, a leather chair, and everything — reading for pleasure. It was in the cozy, coffee-fueled confines of my very own high-rise office that I first read H.L. Mencken’s A Carnival of Buncombe. I was also taken, that summer, by a book called The Suicidal Corporation, by Paul Weaver, a conservative academic who went to work for Ford as a P.R. exec. There he discovered that big business “was less a victim than a sponsor of the regulatory state.” Too true, I thought, as I slurped some more coffee.
Back up on Nob Hill, in the apartment next to mine was a charming raven-haired Parisienne. I took her to a Giants game at the old Candlestick Park and discovered that trying to describe the rules of baseball to someone who speaks very little English is hard if you speak very little French.
Once or twice a week I would slip out in the afternoon to go golfing with an old pal who was also in San Francisco for the summer. We usually played at a goat-trap by the airport, the cheapest course we could find. Finally we wised up and played the magnificent Lincoln Park course, where the bay meets the sea. The third hole was bordered by a copse of cypress trees clinging to the rim of a cliff. As I teed up my ball, I noticed there was a chubby man in full Superman get-up, standing with his fists planted defiantly on his hips and the toes of his red boots just over the edge of the precipice. He surveyed the briny deep as his cape fluttered in the ocean breeze.
If I weren’t already glad not to have been spending the day in some gray, fluorescent-lit utility commission hearing room, the Man of Steel would have cinched it for me.
Come the end of the summer, a veep from PG&E took me to lunch. With all the knowledge I had gathered drinking coffee and reading in my office, I told him I thought PG&E was a suicidal corporation. It was awfully ungrateful of me. He offered to hire me when I graduated. Which rather proved my point, I thought.
