A reader of The Lo-Down, a delightful Lower East Side blog, spotted this letter from Con Ed hanging on a building at East 10th Street:

Dear steam customer,

We understand that this has been a challenging time for all of our customers, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience these outages have caused.  Please be assured that our employees have been working around the clock to restore steam service.  Unfortunately due to storm damage there is limited steam generation capacity at this time. With a cold front expected on Monday and Tuesday (November 5 – November 6), we do not have enough capacity to meet our forecasted demand. Therefore, we are not able to restore any additional customers until more of our steam production units are brought online. We are working to bring additional steam supply into service so we can restore all of our customers. Once the system is capable of handling additional load we will begin restoring customers. We will work to return all customers to service as quickly and safely as possible, and a full system restoration is expected by November 11, 2012.  Thank you for your patience and support.

Charles Veimeister, Steam Business Development

Whaddaya gonna do? A little more explanation would be nice (why do some buildings have steam and not others? is Con Ed, institutionally speaking, aware that using a cold front as rationale for NOT providing more heat is not gonna play in Peoria, or the East Village?) but look, we all saw the footage of the power station on 14th street exploding from a rush of seawater, and I think most Manhattanites trust that Con Ed is working round-the-clock to restore heat and electricity.

As an aside, I have not heard the term “steam generation capacity” this often in such a short time, oh, EVER, and it conjures up steampunk imagery of rats wearing aviator goggles and puffy shirts frantically pedaling stationary penny-farthing cycles to produce blasts of steam that puff through the city’s networks of underground tunnels. Would that this worked.

PS. Oh, one other quibble: “[A]ny inconvenience these outages have caused”? I like that airy tone of possibility, that implication that a weeklong lack of power has only perhaps caused mild annoyance — you know, perhaps on the level of a Rebecca Black video or the DVR cutting off the last minute of Modern Family.