More Gas...

The guy from TXU gas finally showed up at around 5:00pm on Tuesday. It didn't take him long to turn the gas on and relight the pilot lights for me. While he was doing that we talked about what had happened (he said he's had lots of problems with my subdivision in the past because of the similar street names) and he told me something interesting. In the past TXU would leave a tag on the door of a house before turning off the gas. This was because in some cases the new owners didn't know they needed to contact the gas company (I thought this odd, but he said that sometimes new homeowners didn't know they had gas furnaces or water heaters). However TXU changed their policy and no longer gives any warning before disconnecting service. He wasn't sure why they changed, but he said he didn't like it because it wasn't a very customer service oriented policy and it made the field reps like him look bad. I could certainly understand his concern, since he's the public "face" of the company and has to deal directly with people who have had their service disconnected. I reserved my ire for the incompetent person on the phone who entered my service address wrong, even though I had pointed out the difference in addresses and asked her to make sure she had the right one (she even managed to get it right as far as the bill was concerned).

I think one of the things that made me so angry about the whole incident was that having one's service disconnected feels like a hostile act has been initiated against you. Usually, having the gas cut off happens because of non-payment, so you feel like you're getting the deadbeat treatment. Which is infuriating because you paid the bill on time (which is further infuriating because they managed to get the address right for that). And on the subject of the bill, I worry that they will not credit my payment correctly and they'll think I didn't pay the bill. This is because they had to change my account number when correcting the service address (I don't understand why this is necessary, but they claim that it is). They claim that a notice will be sent to the billing department to transfer my payment from the previous account to the new one. Given my dealings with them up to this point, though, I don't trust them to get it right. I just hope they at least send me a past-due notice before cutting the gas off again...