The Ups and Downs of Electric Service

The winds were a-whippin' around on Thursday morning. And at about 6:00am the power in our house blacked out here in South Jersey.

I called PSE&G, our power service company, and was sent to an automated system. At first I was annoyed because I wanted to speak to a person to find out what was going on. But in the end this system was quite helpful and easy to use as it let me know within a minute what the status was (there were many reports of outages in the area) and when power should be back up (around 8:30am).

So I went about my business and got ready for work--in the dark-- and left for work around 8:30 with the power still out.

Around 10am I called PSE&G back to see if I could get a status update since I would go home at lunch to check on things if it was still out. This time, instead of an automated system I got a customer service representative right off the bat. Unfortunately, this rep was rather curt with me but let me know that power had been restored around 9:30. So I was quite disappointed that I would have rather dealt with an automated system instead of this rep. In this economy, there's no excuse to be rude to customers when there's most certainly 100 other people out there who would take your job in a heartbeat.

Hopefully this was just a one time thing with PSE&G... not just the power outage, which happens and is understandable, but also the unfriendly customer service, which is not.