Blackout

Last night, my condo building lost power (not to mention the buildings across the street and throughout the neighborhood). I had come home from school about 20 minutes prior to the big event, and was lounging in boxers and a sweaty tank top (it was a 95 degree walk home from Dupont Circle after all), enjoying the air conditioning and thinking about the mango sorbet I was about to make.

There was an actual audible *BLIP* and suddenly I was immersed in the twilight glow of the end of the day.

I spent about 20 minutes on the phone trying to get through to Pepco to report said outage, and have decided that in addition to the cluelessness that seems to plague this city with regards to public utilities, they also seem to be clueless about customer support. This was evidenced by this recording:

"Thank you for calling Pepco. To report an outage, please stay on the line, or use our website at www.pepco.com."

How could I use their website when I had NO POWER?!

Comments

dl004d said…
You forgot the best part:

When I came home and we used my Blackberry to go online, Pepco's Web page on reporting outages said:

"We regret that we cannot respond to outages reported by e-mail. Please do not dial 911 for outage information or to report power outages."
Anonymous said…
ah yes, the classic. My personal favorite, though, is when you use a friend's phone or a cell phone (as we did earlier this week) to call Verizon and tell them your home phone has no dial tone and you get to the part where they've already acknowledged this information (the no dial tone issue) and then their next question is: "are you calling from your home phone?"
Grand Marnier said…
It's as if people are not thinking before they speak (or record their voice instructions). Do they really think that their customers are that dumb?!

Ugh.
Josh said…
Wow. That's Homer Simpson dumb.

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