This is Part 2 of a four-part series telling Inga’s saga of getting her streetlight fixed.
In last week’s Part 1 of my year-plus effort to get the streetlight in front of my house repaired, the city had finally responded (after a year) to my Get It Done request, but only put in a new bulb.
Because the fixture is on an SDG&E wooden pole, SDG&E would need to come out and actually plug it in. Yup, seriously. These people are all specialists.
So I filed a repair request on SDG&E’s version of the “Let’s Never Get It Done” app that I call “We Can’t Do It Either.”
To do this, information including the pole number was required. At least now there are pole numbers posted on the poles (a definite boost to my previous efforts in 2002 and 2012 to get this light repaired). But there was no place on the repair request site to explain the actual problem.
Fearing this report was just going into a black hole (it did), I decided to try calling SDG&E to see if I could explain this situation to an actual human. Let us in no way suggest that one calls SDG&E and gets quickly connected to a helpful person. No, one gets sucked into the root structure of their phone tree, where you will languish like a decaying morel.
But ultimately (through pathological persistence), I got connected with a customer service rep. He was very nice and listened to my saga. What needed to be done, I explained, was for SDG&E to come out and hopefully find the pole number and plug in the city’s new light bulb to a power source that happens to be right there.
Should be easy, yes? He said he was going to do an “escalation” for us and that it should be fixed in “10 to 15 business days.”
Instead, two weeks later I received an email from SDG&E in response to the repair request I had submitted on their app:
Good morning/afternoon. Unfortunately, this streetlight located at your address is maintained and owned by the city of San Diego and therefore does not fall under SDGE’s streetlighting department. I went ahead and reported this issue on your behalf on the city of San Diego Get It Done website. Here is your report tracking number.
It’s probably a good thing one can’t send photon torpedoes through email.
Meanwhile, the city’s Get It Done app sent me a confirmation of my new service request. I was now in a continuous futile loop.
I fired off gah!-grams to both SDG&E and Get It Done but didn’t hear back (and didn’t expect to). So I called SDG&E yet again and discussed my streetlight dilemma with an actual human. He had all the notes from previous calls and online service requests and conceded that this was a frustrating situation. I will say that SDG&E is very good at note-taking. Just not good at resolution.
I asked if there truly is no mechanism for a human from SDG&E to talk (as in using English language) to a human from the city. Answer: Nope, there isn’t!
Their communication apparently can solely be done by dumping jobs on each other’s apps. But he said he would put in an “escalated request” to send someone to turn on our light bulb, which would happen in “10 to 15 business days.”
Three weeks later, of course, still no working streetlight. I called SDG&E yet again and got another of their genuinely helpful customer care reps, who looked at the case file and said the previous request had been closed because “the work had been completed.” But she was going to put in a new “expedited request” directly to the “streetlight department,” which should get results within — you guessed it — 10 to 15 business days.
You are probably shocked by now to learn that no one showed up. So I called back yet again and got yet another genuinely helpful customer care rep. But this kid is my hero. After reviewing what was at this point the “War and Peace” of case notes (how much money did SDG&E spend not turning on a light bulb?), he came back and reported that he had tried to directly the streetlight escalation person and was puzzled to find that this person was no longer in the employee database. Didn’t work there anymore. Who knows how long he’d been gone?
So all those escalation requests were going into a black hole. He agreed that this situation had gone on long enough and said he was going to send the request directly to his own boss.
I said, “Do we know for a fact that he actually exists?” OK, I was getting jaded. But the kid laughed and said yes, he knew this person was real and actually worked there.
Stay tuned next week for Part 3. It’s nowhere near over.
Inga’s lighthearted looks at life appear regularly in the La Jolla Light. Reach her at [email protected]. ◆
