Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Enemies List: Delmarva Power

This one's personal, not political. My utility company sends out its meter readers during the normal 9-to-5 workday, when I'm out of the house. My gas meter is in the basement, so they can't read it. About once a year, they'll jack up their estimate to get my attention, and I'll phone in the correct meter reading (which always ends up with me having a credit balance on my gas bill.)

But this year, I switched my electric provider to another company under Delaware's (relatively) new utility-choice program. Now, all of a sudden, my phoned-in reading isn't good enough, and they have to set up a meter reading appointment, based on 4 hour blocks. The first one starts at 8 AM (when I leave for work) and the last one starts at 4 PM (when I'm not home from work). Therefore, to get my punitively high (about $800) gas bill back to where it should be, I'm forced to either take time off from work, or else schedule them for the 4-8 PM block and hope they don't get there before about 6:00. I could make the case that I'm being punished for having a job and living alone, but the timing of this move seems to suggest that I'm being punished for ditching their excessive power rates and choosing a different supplier. Oddly enough, they're allowed to withhold payments from my supplier until I either correct the gas reading or pay their gas bill extortion inflation.

And what's worse than that is their ignorant and rude customer service staff. I was shuffled all around their phone system while trying to call in the meter reading/schedule the appointment, and every single one of them had a bad attitude, and...shall we say...a rather uneducated dialect. A helpful hint for future hiring practices: a supervisor in customer relations can "ask" me anything she wants, but should never, EVER try to "axe" me a question. Likewise, I want to schedule "an" appointment, not "a" appointment. Bill Cosby would not approve.

If you're a customer of this outfit that has been treated as poorly as I have, there is hope. You don't have to set up a Google bomb to make their site spring to the top of the results when you search for "hunk of shit". Instead, just keep your cool on the phone with their dropouts, and when you've finished, fill out this form to register a complaint with the state regulators, like I did. If enough of us fill out complaints, they will eventually have to take notice and make this monopoly behave itself.

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