First, yesterday our power went off for absolutely no discernable reason, at 1:30 in the afternoon. It wasn’t raining. It wasn’t windy. No thunder and lightning. And best of all, the outage appeared to affect about four houses, total, on our block. (I say “best of all” because those tiny little outages always take forever to fix; they are a little bit speedier when the outage affects huge swaths of the city. Which is understandable, but still annoying.)
Then I called the power company to report the outage, they were able to tell me that the outage had already been reported and that a team had been dispatched. They were not able to tell me what had caused the outage. They were not able to tell me an estimated time of repair. OK, still not super irritating; this is all somewhat understandable.
But then I called back an hour later to see if they’d had any status updates. “Your power is back on!” the cheerful power company lady told me. I assured her that it was not. “Oh,” she said. Then she said, “I show a team having been dispatched, and an estimated time of repair of 9 pm.”
I said, “That would be a team dispatched to fix the power outage that you just told me was fixed?”
She had no explanation for that one.
Called again a couple of hours later, no team in evidence, and went through the same thing. “Your power is on!” “No, it’s not.” “Oh. We’ve dispatched a team!”
It is irksome to me that the power company handles its customer service in large call centers, and that the CSRs who answer the phones have absolutely no idea what is going on in the field. I mean, none. They never know what caused the outage, they never have an accurate time of arrival for the workers, and they never have an accurate estimate of when the problem will be fixed. Often they seem to lose track of what exactly the problem is and whether it has been already fixed or not.
The power did finally come back on around 9:00 pm. Then the power company busily went to work burying a line of some sort…and in the process sliced through the phone cable.
The phone company assures us that the phone will be back on “in 24 hours…or so.”