By rights, I should be delighted that the power outage scheduled from 9am till 4pm is not going ahead today. Trust me, on any other day I would be. Today, however, I’m really ticked off because Ausnet Services, the electricity wholesaler that supplies electricity to a huge chunk of Melbourne, didn’t think to let us know the outage had been cancelled.
To be fair, we’ve had ferocious winds since Sunday, so a lot of areas have been without power…in an unscheduled way. Clearly, getting power to them has to be a first priority. But…it’s not the guys who go out and actually fix things that send us texts and letters about our electricity supply. It is…ta dah…the office types who do that. And…ta dah no. 2…not one of those office types had the mental capacity to go…”oh, hang on, didn’t we schedule a power outage for Tuesday? Maybe we should send a text out…”
Now it may well be that as a wholesaler, Ausnet Services only has the phone numbers of people like me – i.e. people who ring up and complain. So, still to be fair, maybe Ausnet Services doesn’t have the phone number of every person they supply. But. They must know who the retailers are in their area. Right?
How hard would it have been to ring up a few retailers and let them know? Then at least there would have been the possibility that the retailers could have diverted some resources to letting us know.
Or…! Failing all else, someone at Ausnet Services could have changed the automated message you get when you ring them about outages. You know, the one where you have to pick dinky numbers that never match the reason for your call…-cough-
Because I was expecting an outage today, I haven’t checked Twitter to see if Ausnet Services left a notice there. If you’ve seen such a notice, I’d love to hear about it in comments. Whether they did or didn’t though, I’d just like to point out that not everyone is on Twitter, or Facebook [makes the sign to ward off evil]. In fact, there are probably a lot of people who are on neither. So where does a large corporation’s responsibility end?
I could go on about how corporate culture has killed the concept of customer service, but I have to go mop the laundry floor again. Why? Because I was stupid. Thinking the power would be off any moment, I decided to fill the washing machine via a hose. While it was filling I thought I’d check with Ausnet Services because it was closer to 10am than 9am and we still had power. The rest I’m sure you can work out for yourselves.
-sigh-
Meeks
p.s. has anyone else noticed that WordPress is distorting images from the Media Library when you insert them into a post?
November 19th, 2020 at 2:51 pm
Nicely vented, m’dear. 🙂
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November 20th, 2020 at 8:57 am
-bows- 😀
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November 18th, 2020 at 1:55 pm
Sounds frustrating… I hope today is calmer. I’ve had o issues with image uploads but I only upload standard images…
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November 18th, 2020 at 10:25 pm
The image seemed to go through properly today, so fingers crossed it was only a temporary glitch.
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November 17th, 2020 at 6:29 pm
I’ve not used any images other than ones I upload. I feel grateful that we so rarely have a power cut (JINX!!!) we can usually go years here, certainly without a scheduled one. The joy of living in a city, I guess. x
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November 18th, 2020 at 10:03 am
Technically, Warrandyte is ‘part’ of Melbourne, but it’s that part that straddles the ‘burbs and real rural areas. Plus it’s right in the middle of what we call the ‘Green Wedge’. For reasons known only to themselves the suppliers of electricity have focused their upgrades on areas outside Warrandyte. Maybe there just aren’t enough customers here to make us important.
Re the images, I use mostly homegrown images as well, and the ones I was trying to use were screenshots from my game. No idea why they would suddenly appear as if they’d been badly stretched. 😦
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November 17th, 2020 at 12:54 pm
Yep. The distortion thing’s been happening ad hoc for a while. No longer takes png files either.
The service provider would have been notified of the changes to the schedule, and they are supposed to send a text or message to those who are on the auto-notice thingy/db (a bit like a sign-up to get their advertising guff – or bill notification; and outage notification).
They do it here, too. Outages without notification, no outage when one’s been scheduled, no notification of the end of the outage, or notification when the outage is over, but there’s still no power. I have a word for them, but I can’t say it here.
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November 17th, 2020 at 5:29 pm
I’m sputtering I’m laughing so hard. SAME word, Cage, same word. 😀 😀
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November 17th, 2020 at 11:45 am
That sounds like an aargh-worthy situation!
I haven’t noticed image distortion.
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November 17th, 2020 at 5:30 pm
Cage said it’s been happening for a while. My last post only had a short video clip in it so I’ve only just noticed the distortion. I thought at first my image file had been corrupted somehow [in Media Library]. So I uploaded the image again. No dice. If this is a glitch, I hope they fix it soon.:(
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November 18th, 2020 at 5:09 am
I’ll look out for image weirdness.
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November 18th, 2020 at 9:55 am
Let me know if it happens to you too.
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November 18th, 2020 at 2:13 pm
Will do.
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