So a tree hit our house on Monday night, September 28th around 6:30pm. There was a huge wind storm all day and lots of stuff all around town were broken in many charming ways. It caused a small fire outside and knocked out our power. The firemen were by, took one look and left. The 911 operator transferred me to the fire department who was mean to me as I was scrambling to find out what was going on and eventually ended the call with ‘We’ll send someone out as soon as we can *CLICK*’ while I was still talking. Essential services my ASS. If it’s essential to yell at panicked people which she certainly did, then yes, maybe we should pay these people an exorbant amount of money to do their jobs.

The Hydro people showed up around the same time. They looked at the wire, told us that they’d need a cherry picker to get the line down and that since there was a high level of incidents that we should expect something in the morning. Fire and Hydro were back the next morning when the firemen told us that we were lucky the line didn’t start a fire since it was live the whole night. You would think that they would have mentioned that YESTERDAY since they were both there at the same time looking at the same problem. Well done, guys.

The line was worked on and the electronics were fixed yesterday around noon. Power was restored THIS MORNING. It took nearly TWO DAYS to get power back up and running. I called the poor customer service people three times to ask if anything was going to get done. Each time they sympathetically listened, made no promises and forwarded the information on to the crews electronically. It must be done through some TTY, pager or texting interface as I could hear them type out the descriptive message as I was talking with them.

Hydro was here yesterday with a cherry picker for 10 minutes. I don’t know why they stopped or what they were doing, but they parked accross the street and waited… then left. They might have looked at the house from across the street, but they didn’t actually get close enough to do any work of any kind.

So, kudos to the hydro customer service. Thank you for being patient and understanding. Thank you to the contracted electricians who were prompt and efficient. A BIG no thank you to the fire department and to the hydro company for both being rude, judgemental and innefficient.

Firemen: If there’s a potential fire, please tell us BEFORE. Thanks.
Hydro: If you park outside my house for a quarter of an hour, please do work. Thanks.

Also firemen, hire some of the customer service people from hydro, because yours suck.

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Do you have a story of the storm, Thunder Bay or even something that’s similar that’s happening in your home town? Leave it in the comments!