Bitch of the Week: Land of the Morons

For my bitch of the week, I unabashedly choose the electricity company Pepco as my victim.

When my boyfriend and I first moved into our apartment in July, a few weeks after our move-in date we received one of those friendly "Intent to Disconnect" letters, as no one had come forward to accept responsibility for the electricity at our address. Fair enough. We called Pepco to sign up - and my boyfriend was already on the lists. Oh. Must have been a mistake. Letter sent out before the apartment building put our names in. Fine. We're even able to go to the Pepco website and create a convenient online file for our account.

A week later, we get another Intent to Disconnect Letter. Still, no one has come forward to accept responsibility. Um, yes, yes we have. So we must call Pepco again. Like most big service companies they have an irritating phone menu that you have to talk to, clearly and loudly and in a quiet room, before you get to actually talk to a person. When I do finally get to a person and explain my problem, after being on hold for a minute I'm told some interesting news - we had been given the wrong account number. The account for our address was actually under a different number that we were unaware of. Lovely.

But the person I talked to said she fixed everything, and that I just had to make a new file on the Pepco website for the new account number. I do so, and the intent to disconnect letters stopped coming. For a while. You see, four months later, we had yet to receive a single bill. Nothing in the mail, nothing in email for either of us, no payments due listed on the Pepco website. And we get another intent to disconnect letter for our truancy.

That's when I realized that, when signing on to our file on Pepco's website, the account number nicely displayed in the top right hand corner was still the old, wrong account number. Um, what the fuck? So again I'm on the phone to Pepco. The first person I get to says she can't help me, and sends me to another division. The people there say they can't help me either and that I have to go back to the first division and ask to talk to a manager. Back at the first division the woman I talk to is surprised that I asked for a manager, since she can help me herself. Makes me wish I could find that first person I talked to and strangle them.

After a long, arduous ordeal where we tried to get me into the right account, I was put on hold after which I was greeted with another surprise: the first time I set up an online file for the right account number, it didn't seem to stick. I had to re-register, from the beginning. Finally the online file works, and I make our overdue payment through the website. I make sure to sign up for paper bills, too. The intent to disconnect letters take a break.

The next two months, we receive our bills, I go to the website, I make the payments, and move on with life. It was holiday rush, we were crazy busy and spending money like mad, so I didn't realize that the money was not being taken out of my account. The third bill is, of course, accompanied by another intent to disconnect letter. I immediately go the website, see that the previous two payments were not listed as paid, and try to pay the whole thing. Another week later, another intent to disconnect letter.

AGAIN on the phone with Pepco. I get to a person and tell them my problem, and ask if there is any record of any of my attempts to make online payments. And of course, there isn't. Great. Now there isn't even proof that I've been effing trying to pay them but they won't take my money. I ask them if the fact that we had that previous mix-up with the wrong account number might be causing trouble, and I find out that our online file for that wrong account number is still active. Why didn't Pepco kill it last time I was on the phone with them? The woman tells me I have to close it out myself. Great. I go to the website, sign in to the old account (yes it's still there), and there's no clear way to kill it without potentially accidentally killing service to our apartment. I call Pepco again, and this time the person is like, Oh I'll inactivate the account for you. !!!!!! The first person said I had to do it!!!!!! *death*

I try, one more time, to make our payment through the website. No dice. The money stays in my account. I attempt to pay it over the phone, but they only take ATM cards and credit cards I don't have. Finally I decide to give up all my bank account info over the phone to make sure we can pay the damn bills before they cut out our service. And they don't even let me pay the full balance at once, just the overdue payments. Great.

So, days go by. The date by which our overdue payments are required to be in passes by. And the money still rests quietly in my account. At least now I have a confirmation number for my payment that the nice phone lady gave me, but I'm not taking any chances with these morons. I don't want our power cut off. I call them and they say the payment was listed as paid - days ago. I don't know how that works with the money still in my account, but fine. At last, today, the money gets taken.

Realizing that people as incompetent as those who work at Pepco are probably in charge of most of our basic necessities could be enough to make me paranoid. I still don't know why their damn website has ceased to work, so I'm just not going to bother using it anymore.