Friday, October 13, 2006

Stupid utility company

It's noon on a Friday. I should be at work. Am I? No. I'm sitting in my house waiting for the local gas company to come and light my furnace.

The other day I filled out an online form to request service. I filled out all of the required fields marked by an asterisk, not filling out the unrequired ones. I chose an available service date of Wednesday (I filled out the form on Tuesday).

On Wednesday I got a call from said gas company requesting I complete the application. I guess the non-asterisk fields were actually required. Silly me for not being a psychic. Then she informed me that they couldn't come until Friday. Well why do they have a calendar that allows you to choose your service date?

I requested a time window of their visit, as every other utility company I've dealt with will give. She said they don't do that, it will be somewhere between 8 a.m. and midnight. Wow. Thanks. She said since I work, I should just leave a key somewhere for them.

Excuse me? Am I super paranoid or is it odd that it's completely acceptable for a stranger to have free access to my house for 9 hours? I told her that was unacceptable. And I have a dog. She told me I should leave my sweet, 12 pound Angel outside while at work. Umm, no. It's cold outside. She convulses with cold when I make her go to the bathroom outside in the mornings.

So, here I am waiting for the gas company to come. Not able to leave my house in case they come just because I didn't want to leave a key for them. Bastards.

On a brighter note. I just got a MySpace bulletin from the show Dexter. They have posted their second episode online for free! Woohoo! I don't have Showtime so I rely on the kindness of them. Here is a link for the first two episodes, but I'm not sure if you need a MySpace account.

A brief rundown of the show is it's based off a book. The main character is a serial killer who works for a police department studying blood spatter. He only kills other serial killers. Is that a cool concept or what? I'm off to watch episode 2.

4 comments:

Jennifer McKenzie said...

Worst of all, it'll take them all of five minutes to light the darn thing. *sigh* I know how you feel.
Hope you enjoyed your day anyway.

Anonymous said...

I think American companies and service people have some of the worst service in the world.

When I got a new DSL line installed (every house is wired differently and must be tested) in Japan, they called, made an appointment and came by. It was none of this "Sit on your ass at home all day and we'll come and fix your problem whenever we feel like it."

They seem to forget that you're the paying customer here. UGH!

Lisa Pulliam said...

Uh, exactly Jen! Then when I was done with heat for the day I turned it off. Like I always have with my electric heat. Turns out turning it off blows out the pilot light. So my dad had to come down and help me fix it. Yay for daddies!

Wow, Angelle. That would be so nice! I agree, they do seem to forget that. It's like with the post office too a lot of times. I get so much attitude from many of the workers at my local post office. It's like they act like they're the only shop in town, unfortunatley for a lot of stuff they are.

Cheryl said...

When I switched internet providers from my phone company to my cable company, service went down the first week. I called, and it took them a full week to come out and fix it. A few months went by, and it went down again. I called. They said it would be four days before they would come out. I said, "Cancel my service then." Oh, oh, they just a cancellation and could come by that very same day! *go figure*