I have literally never heard of an outage for maintenance.

My local electrical co-op seems to be able to do maintenance by powering-down specific components without interrupting power to anyone, ever. The only time we ever have an outage is when a storm downs some lines or a transformer blows, but those are events that don't happen every year.

Same here.

Well, at the old commercial building I worked at they had to replace the pole that our 3 phase transformer was on. The pole started to warp, and once it was off center, the bend in the pole increased slowly. It only served our building. They did call to schedule the replacement. We told them Friday about noon was perfect. We pulled the power to the 3 phase panel to the equipment, and we went home early on Friday. It was really tough to leave early.

The primary risks are micro-outages (milliseconds in length), voltages surges (extremely rare), and short cycle outages (seconds).

Your local electrical provider is short cycling your power during an outage. Turn breakers off if it makes you sleep better. But eventually they are going to get powered up again. And if they can't take cycling on/off then something is wrong.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1603294273.JPG
Here's a pic of what they were working on up the block.
They went around and pulled some connectors that went from the high tension lines to the poles with transformers on them to disconnect us from the grid.

My big problem now is I can't seem to keep my wife's iPad connected to the internet when she shuts the cover to shut it down. I tried to set it up the way it was before I messed with it prior to the outage but haven't had much luck.

I think she solved it herself!
She did a total reset of the iPad and is happy with it now.
Thank goodness.