I feel so sorry for the poor girl that answered the phone at the Alabama Power Company the other day. A few things came together to make that phone call no fun for her!

  • First of all, I used Skype to call her, and I wasn’t wearing my headphones - so she was basically on speaker phone.
  • Next, my husband arrived home in the middle of the call.
  • And then, she informed me that the information that had been given to me on my last call with the company was incorrect, and they actually needed more money from us to keep our electricity from being cut off.

I got so upset, and I finally realized that there was no way that the previous information was going to work for us. We were going to have to do what this lady was telling us - not what the last lady told us we would need to do.

So then I got a little frustrated…uh…yeah… And I began to question the validity of her information.

“How do I know what you are telling me is true, if the last lady got it wrong?!” I was kind of at the end of my rope. (I hate it when I get like that.)

So I was bickering back and forth with her and Mark steps in to join me. So now she had both of us hollering at her. It was rather comical - I felt like we were in some ‘watch the hillbilly’s freak out’ skit on SNL or something!

The only thing that I could think to protect myself (us) at the moment was to get all of this lady’s information. I asked for her name and she supplied her first name. I let her know I meant her full name and I also asked her in which office she was working. I figured if her information was wrong, at least I’d have knowledge of exactly who gave it to me. With my luck, I’d get, “We’re sorry, ma’m, that woman was fired last week. We’ll need $10,000 today to keep your electricity on and she should have told you that. There is nothing we can do.”

Well, anyway, while it was comical, I do feel badly for letting that poor woman have it like we did. None of what transpired was her fault - our being late, the other lady giving us wrong information…

And since I do know exactly who she is and where she works, I suppose I could do something about that, eh?