Phone snafu left EMC in dark like customers

Phone

snafu left EMC in dark like customers

I just finished

reading your column entitled, "Business or

government, it's hard to reach a human anymore [The

Citizen, July 28]." First, let me thank you for

alerting us to the fact that we're not listed in the

Fayette white pages of the BellSouth telephone book; it

seems our problems with BellSouth are even larger than we

knew.

Secondly, I

wish that there had been something I or Coweta-Fayette

EMC could have done for you - and all of the other

people - on Saturday, July 24, when heavy storms

caused the outages in Fayette County.

Unfortunately,

Mr. Beverly, we didn't become aware of the message

telling people our phones had not been connected until

mid-day Saturday. We immediately called BellSouth, who

did not repair the problem until mid-day Sunday, well

after we had restored power after Saturday evening's

storms.

We are as

perplexed as you are about our telephone service; we have

had the same phone number for the last seven to eight

years, and our telephone bill is a large one each month.

During the period that the erroneous message was on the

EMC's telephone line, board members, management staff and

I received telephone calls at home throughout the night.

Like you, we were not at all pleased with the service

that our member/customers were getting, yet our hands

were tied.

"Murphy's

Law" does work. On Friday [July 23] we converted our

incoming telephone trunks to have Caller ID at our

telephone switch. This will enable us in the future to

automatically take power outage information and improve

our customer service during the day as we instantly

recognize customer calls.

However,

BellSouth did not make the proper connection before they

left and our main telephone number had the recording of

"this number is not yet connected." Since they

did this work after hours Friday, we did not catch the

problem until the following morning. Unfortunately, it

took an additional 24 hours to correct BellSouth's error.

Again,

please accept our apology and know that whenever there is

an electrical outage, our linemen are out there working

hard to restore your power. And although we couldn't help

it that our telephones were out of order [that] weekend,

we're sorry for the inconvenience.

Michael

C. Whiteside

President

and CEO

Coweta-Fayette

EMC

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