Apparently my abilities to project menace work over a much further distance than I imagined possible.
After a long day of kid schlepping, being harassed by two labradoodles, and the odd server move for the websites…I was relaxing on the floor of the living room when my sister Meghann hits me up on the ol’ text message delivery device.
Their condo had apparently suffered a total power outage and she sends me a couple of screenshots showing that PWC (the local utility) didn’t seem to think there was an outage.
Ordinarily when the lights go off round here, you can either ring the human being on the 1-800-Loser line or notify Dook Energy via their website or an app assuming you’ve got power on the device and a working network connection.
She calls their “customer support” line after selecting the option to report an outage, it directs her to file an outage report online via a link it sent to her phone.
That’s apparently the only way they’ll accept an outage report.
I wonder what they expect someone who only has a land-line or a dumb cell phone to do in that instance.
If you ask me, PWC is just asking for a class-action lawsuit for damages if not prosecution under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Someone with only a land-line and a medical device that depends on having power might want to be able to report the outage with some sort of urgency!
As I wasn’t doing anything else particularly productive, I figured I’d ring up PWC and see if I were any more successful at getting to a human to make the report of the outage.
Their system correctly identified my phone number with Fayetteville’s former area code (919 represent, yo!) but no amount of trying to abort out of the prompts would dissuade that system from wanting to send me a link to report the outage.
I dump the call and try again via a different path in the VRU to see if I can get directly to a human (which Meghann had by this point only to find that their representative was about as useless as tits on a boar hog and even less informed about the outage than Meghann was!).
PWC’s system picks up my second call and almost instantly I get a text message that the lights are back on about 65 miles south of me.
We have a working theory that the system saw that 919 area code hit them a second time in short succession and was all “oh &#@#!, it’s the *UTILITIES COMMISSION*…we’d best throw the switches straightaway!”
I’ve known that my ability to make my displeasure directly known to whoever I’m talking to over the phone can go great distances.
I’d never imagined that the mere projection of menace without even making contact would work over distance as well. 😉