The gas company only comes around every six months or so to check my meter reading. The rest of the time they overestimate my usage and charge me about $200 a month in gas for living in a one bedroom apartment. We’re encouraged to do the gas man’s work for him by reading and submitting our own readings, but this is nearly impossible. Oh sure, they say you can enter it online or over the phone but when you actually try this you’re either told that your entry is invalid or an error appears. Trying to figure out why this is happening is nearly impossible.
Reading a gas meter is not difficult. My meter reading is definitely less than the estimate. I’ve been keeping my thermostat set at 60° this winter, and 55° while I’m not at home. The only thing I can figure out is that they won’t accept readings that are lower than the estimate unless it comes from the actual gas man. Who doesn’t exist.
Running the Dominion gas gauntlet of automated phone menus is the worst experience of its kind that I’ve ever had. There is no quick way to jump to a customer service representative. You can’t simply hit zero to be directed there, and they don’t tell you how to get there in the automated menu. I lucked into it by pounding the 9 key about 20 times. Their hours are 7am to 7pm M‑F, but only on Mars. Many places, after being on hold for 5 or 10 minutes, offer to take your number and call you back when your place in the queue is reached. I hung up and called again, figuring that if I pretended I was going to cancel my service that I’d get to a representative faster. Turns out Dominion does have that leave your number thing, but I was only prompted for it after I’d plugged all the “Cancel this Account” buttons. Now I have to wait between 1:03 and 1:17 to get a callback. Pounding the 9 key about 20 times probably just sent me permanently to the bottom of the queue. Touch-tone Hell. Those gouging incompetents at Dominion…
I’ve been on hold for over thirty minutes at this point, listening to some broad spell out URLs and writhing in agony at a repeated smooth jazz rendition of While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
This version is much cooler, mainly because of Prince.
True.
Yesterday my wife noticed a Dominion truck parked on the street so she went out to try to find out WTF (why the fuck) our meter hasn’t been read. The guy in the the truck pointed to a meter reader guy who was down the street and said it’s too late because he was already past our house. My wife didn’t hear the knock on the door apparently but the fucking money grubbing asshole Dominion worker wouldn’t turn around and walk a 100 feet back to read our meter. It’s unbelievable. And a few weeks back it was reported in the PD that Dominion wants to charge a fee to customers who manage to lower their bill through conservation. These fuckers need to called out big time.
I suggest a google-bombing campaign. Link something like Dominion Gas Has Bad Customer Service to their main website. And if enough people do it, those results will appear right after Dominion’s main page.
Dominion is not professional and they do not care about the consumer. Try calling them to work out a mistake they make on your bill and watch the poor quality of their customer service shine through. They tried to disconnect my service because they had a glitch in there pipp plan system but Ohio Department of Development had all my paper work and had no problem maintaining the correct information on the same account. I waited on the phone for one hour for them to tell me they could not help me and then to hang up on me. I called back to wait an hour again on the phone for a supervisor. I am still waiting for them to handle there mistake. I wish there was some other gas companies to give them some competition. I wonder how many other consumers have had problems? I wish others would post there reviews here to let Dominion know we are tired of it and want good customer service.!!