Unfortunately, The Power is in Their Hands

David Heath
Monday, 07 April 2008 17:51

Business IT - Networking

Melbourne’s recent storm-caused electricity crisis was just like déjà vu all over again!

In a deregulated environment, near enough has always been good enough.  If (on a good day) your favourite electricity provider receives 10 service calls per hour and each call lasts 6 minutes, then they only need a single operator to handle the calls.

Fast forward to last Wednesday – according to various reports as many as 400,000 Melbourne homes lost their electricity supply for some period of time during extreme wind storms.  During this period, every person I knew who attempted to contact their supplier found either an automated recording: “we are aware of multiple outages…” or an engaged tone.  For the first day, I know no-one who spoke to an operator.  How would the caller know if their supplier was aware that the problem existed.

In my own case, “some period of time” was 66 hours. 

Please, don’t get me wrong, the technicians on the ground did amazing work.  My own house was reconnected at 7:30 in the morning – you can’t tell me it was instantaneous – the guys must have worked through the night.

My beef is with the electricity retailers and distributors.  I suggest you go to the website of my retailer and look for the phone number for “Electricity Faults and Emergencies,” (hint: it’s on their “contact us” page).  Call the number provided and (to no-one’s surprise) NONE of the automatic response options has anything to do with emergencies, they’re all sales focussed.  After punching random options, I’m connected with an operator who asks my suburb and offers me another phone number – the company who actually delivers my electricity.

Remind me – what (exactly) do Truenergy do?

Upon dialing the new number, unlike my wife and others who hit nothing but automated tapes or engaged tones, I hit the jackpot; I’m actually connected with an operator.  Although unable (instructed?) to offer a timeline, he was able to give a specific reason for my own outage and tell me, yes, it had been reported by others and the specific fault identified.