Stop Laughing
New Member
Yeah, my gas really stinks... the gas company, Nicor, that is. We paid the bill ahead awhile ago and I guess kinda forgot about it. Anyways, we didn't get any urgent bills from them and one day we found a disconnect warning in our bushes with a different address on it (9881, our house is 9802) and thought it wasn't for us since it was just laying in the bushes and didn't have our address on it. We obviously overestimated them. The next day (two weeks earlier from today, a Thursday) I woke up to a very unpleasant ice cold shower. We called them up immediately and got the bill paid (it got to about $300, but we've had it higher without being disconnected before) after going through their asinine automatic phone system. It makes me appreciate the power company's touch tone system, cause the word recognition thing Nicor uses doesn't understand a damn thing and rerouted us to the beginning 3 times before we got through. Then we had to go through it all again (even more asinine, after going through its options, all it did was give us a different phone number to call and go through its own automatic phone service) to get turned back on and schedule someone to relight our pilot lights. The soonest they said was available was Tuesday, and we were upset about it, but since that was the soonest they had, we had no choice but to take it. It didn't end there, though, they said they would come anytime that day between 7AM and midnight. WTF? Even the cable company gives a 4 hour window, why is theirs 17 hours? So I took the day off of work, woke up early in hope that it'd be over with quick, and I waited... and waited... and waited... Eventually my brother gets home from school at 3, we call them to find out what's going on and they still said we're scheduled for sometime before midnight. A couple of hours later my mother gets home from work, we ate dinner, watched TV, and it's getting later and later. We called again, same message. It's getting hard for me to even stay awake any longer at this point. Midnight rolls around, and still nothing. No knock on the door, no phone call, and it's after business hours so they're only taking emergency calls. We called their emergency line and they gave us an attitude for calling them and it not being an emergency. I was extremely pissed off at this point. I screamed at them, I gave up a day of work and waited the entire 17 hours for them and they don't so much as even call to let us know they're not coming? The next morning I called them and scheduled a relight after work, and they actually showed up on time, and were done in 15 minutes. We sent them an E-mail complaint which they clearly ignored based on their condescending reply. We've also registered the complaint with the CUB (citizens utility board) but I don't think much will happen with that. I know we missed paying for a while, but that's no excuse for the shitty service they gave us.
Sorry, I needed to vent, since my furnace wasn't able to for nearly a week.
Sorry, I needed to vent, since my furnace wasn't able to for nearly a week.
but anyway, we usually turn them out for the summer and relight them ourselves in the fall.
