Why Dominion East Ohio Sucks

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.

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