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About Us

The story and the people behind the site

The idea for this site was sparked several years ago when someone at work e-mailed around a bunch of funny stories that had taken place at BVE. I had never worked at Blackstone, but because I understood the "utility atmosphere", I thought the stories where hilarious. Back then it seemed we were just waiting for the news that EUA was being sold or would merge with another utility. I got to thinking about how it was too bad that all of this EUA "lore" would be lost once we were sold to the highest bidder. Sure, our lore would meld into the lore of the new company, but the utility industry was quickly changing and would never, for better and for worse, be the same.

About a year after that, with employee attrition at an all-time high, I got the idea to put together an "alumni" night. This would be a reunion of sorts to get the people who had left the company together with the people who had stayed, for the purpose of catching up on old times. A lot of people really liked the idea. We could, we theorized, put together an e-mail list of our former co-workers and advertise the party that way. As it happened, life got in the way and the party never got off the ground, but the idea still seemed like a good one.

Long before I came to EUA, I had read an article about a couple of former GTE employees, part of a large group which had been laid off at the same time, who put together a newsletter called The GTE Alumni as a way to keep in touch with their old co-workers. This concept seemed to transfer perfectly to the employees of EUA - a company which had lasted almost one hundred years!

Then, of course, on Superbowl Sunday, 1999 the EUA survivors (employees who stuck it out to the end) got the infamous call about the merger with NEES. Now it seemed more important than ever to find a way to keep from losing whatever it was that made EUA such a ...well whatever it was...

Being a long-time proponent of the Internet, I knew that even one site can bring together people from all over the world. Since I design web sites, I knew I could develop one for EUA Alumni everywhere. I got together with my friend Patti Tweedie, and asked her what she thought. Patti is a great organizer. Together we came up with some ideas for what an EUA Alumni site should have, always keeping in mind that more pages could be added later.

While I designed the site, Dave Baril created a bulletin board for communicating with all alumni, and a registration database so that alumni could locate each other. The Bulletin Board and the registration database were lost in the Spring of 2001 when the server of our hosting service crashed. Eventually I was able to rebuild the bulletin board using a free community bulletin board system powered by Everyone.net I think it works really well and I even got it to look just like one of our official site pages. I chose to rebuild the database registration using a simple feedback form. That way all data is managed by me and alumni will be contacted by me first if someone is looking for them.

But back when our site was nearing completion, when EUA still roamed the earth, I learned that someone in management was, um...displeased...about the site. Oh well, the Internet was still young then and it's natural for many people to fear the unknown - especially when they work for a utility. I tried to reassure the powers that be that the site was a good thing. Apparently, public opinion was on our side, and eventually a compromise was worked out - hence the carefully worded disclaimer on the front page. Now the challenge was to get the site up and ready before we were all scattered to the winds.

We hope you are happy with the site and that you will visit often. Please contribute your own ideas as to how the site could be better. Send in your stories and photos. If you would like to volunteer to work on the site, please let us know! E-mail this site address to anyone you know who ever worked for EUA. But most importantly - register and become an official member. This site is for you!

Keep in touch!

Sincerely,
Mary Tufts
Founder, EUA Alumni Organization