Last night the power went out in my subdivision.  I decided to not call because any one of the 120 other homes was prob. calling in.  Sure enough by about 9:50 a repair truck pulls up in my cul-du-sac with a repair man stepping out.  I walked outside and greeted him and asked him what was going on - he said “Not a good evening with the underground stuff,” he then asked where the underground box was located - thinking it was in my backyard.  It actually is directly behind my yard in the neighbors with a fence dividing it.  So I told the repair guy to go around the block and I’d shine the flashlight for him to see which house it was.

He drove around and walked into the back yard, where I was leaning over the fence with my light - and he discovered two things.  One the box had an ant hill on half the size of it, and two the other side of the box was covered in a giant bush in attempts to hide it.  “Guess they won’t like it when I chain saw this ‘motha down” he said, obviously a bit disgruntled, and proceeded to walk back to his truck.  Coming back he yanked the chainsaw Christmas Vacation style and proceeded to trim that bush down so he could get at it.   After another hour he and his other repair men left, unable to resolve the issue with it - and they searched for more problems elsewhere in the subdivision.  I gave up and went to bed and woke up to the sound of, no power still. 

I manually raised my garage and pulled my car out and as I drove out of the subdivision there they were, 4 trucks all working hard trying to figure out what the deal was.  Since I was a bit late I didn’t bother to ask what the deal was, figuring I’d call the customer service line once I got to work.  There in lies my frustration.  I should have stopped and talked to the “American/English is my first language Repair men,” where I could have gotten the poop on what was going on.

Now Austin (and surrounding areas) have several different choices for power, there is the Austin Energy Company, Perdernales Electric, Reliant, and several others.  But we went with TXU because of the 2 year contract we got with a discount.  So when I call customer service for TXU (Texas Utilities or Texas Electric and Gas) I expect to talk with a Texan, someone local.  But NOOOOOOOOOOO… I’m talking to Bangalore, India.  I’m talking to someone who can’t even get my address right after I’ve repeated it 3 times.  It’s not hard.   Then I realize that I’m talking to a company that has the highest customer dis-statisfaction rating.  Apparently there are some others that have come across the same problem.

I then realized that TXU outsourced my safety and security to another country, and even though I had told these people I had a medical condition, I didn’t get any help, nor could they help me as they weren’t even on our part of the globe.

Moving on, after my useless customer service rep figured out where I was located she then transferred me to someone else because I was in the wrong queue.  Mind you I called the 800 number, choose to speak to someone about an outage, yet I still some how ended up in the wrong place? The 2nd person I talked to was just as bad and asked me all the same questions the first person did,  but let me know that by 11am power “should” be restored. 

I await anxiously.

[ratings]

Tags: Austin Links, company, electric, TXU
Posted in Austin Links, Life, news |

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 7:15 am and is filed under Austin Links, Life, news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.