Cleveland Utilities

Is no customer service really customer service at all?



Yesterday at around 10 AM the power at our apartment went out. Being the good citizen that I am (and always looking for a new reason to kvetch) I called Cleveland Utilities to let them know. Unfortunately, they must have gotten wind of my kvetchiness (I think I just made up a new word) and took preventative action. Why do I think this? Well, the first time I called the phone just rang and rang and rang (you get the idea). So I hung up and tried again. 22 rings (yes that is right 22 - I know cause I counted 'em) later the system finally picks up. "1" is the option to report a power outage so I press it. Well, that was about effective as George Bush's foreign policy (as in it got me nowhere). In fact pressing "1" worked so well the message came on again instructing me to press "1" to report a power outage. I distinctly got the feeling that I could have stood there all year pressing "1" and still wouldn't have been able to report our outage.



I don't know about you but I would think that a utility company could afford a phone system that actually worked so that it's customers could report problems.



UPDATE: When I went on their website to tell them of my experience yesterday (yes thats right to COMPLAIN) even though I filled out all the little boxes on their form, the thing wouldn't go through. I kept getting a "connection error" ... man is this company in denial!

Kudos to SkyRidge

It all began Friday when I got home from work. My darlin' and I were planning on a quick trip to Knoxville. She was going to take a national certification for counseling exam and I was going along for the ride. I had been reading Divided Loyalties about Knoxville and East Tennessee in the Civil War and thoguht we might visit a few sites after her exam. On the ride up she had told me that she had a stitch in her side (like the kind you get from running). Well, she took her exam and then asked if we could just take a nice drive home instead of bouncing around Knoxville. Long story short, by 7 pm we were in the Emergency Room of SkyRidge Medical Center.

The wait was indeed onerous (we finally left at 12:30 in the AM) but there was no solid conclusion. The blood tests didn't show appendicitis for shure only the slight possibility of it. They told us to come back on Sunday sometime before noon for another blood test. We did just that but again the results were inconclusive.

Let me pause here to thank the good people at SkyRidge. Everyone was extremely nice and had good bedside manners. I know you hear stories about doctors and nurses that have the personality of a STOP sign, but these folks were nice. It made the whole ordeal easier to go through.

So around noon on Sunday a very cool Dr. by the name of Knabb came in to talk to us. He made us very comfortable and was thorough in his explanations. The result: my darlin' decided to have her appendix out. She was whisked off to surgery and about an hour later the deed was done. She came home on Monday and her Mom came down to help out with the recovery. All is now well on the homefront.