A few nights ago during a thunderstorm my power went out around 11 PM. Not a big deal because I was heading to bed soon anyway. The weather has been nice enough that I can leave the windows open without it becoming too hot or too cold, so I wasn’t worried about that, my only real concern was the food in my fridge. In any event, I decided to call my local power company to report the outage since most of my neighborhood is older people and I presumed in bed already unaware of the outage.

My local electric company has an automated voice activated customer service attendant, I hate these things. For whatever reason, this one seemed to understand everything I had to say, a true first.

After reporting the power outage, the automated woman’s voice on the other end asked a simple question that makes so much sense, “Would you like a wakeup call?” I hadn’t thought about it, I guess I planned on using my cell phone to wake me up, but decided to try the service out. The voice asked what time I’d like to be called and I told her 7:45 AM, she understood me!

About an hour later I heard my TV kick back on, power had been restored. Because I was already in a pretty decent state of sleep, I got up, turned the TV off and crawled back into bed, not bothering to reset my alarm clock. Sure enough at 7:45 my cell phone rang with a wake up call. As a backup, I had set my cell phone’s alarm clock to go off 5 minutes after that just in case the call didn’t come through.

The little things like this are what make me want to stick with a company; it was a nice, well thought out touch.

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