I feel like I'm losing my utilities...

Lockdown has been hard, I know that’s the same for everyone. At one point we had 4 people at home all on laptops doing zoom/teams meetings or online work/emails/RoadBlox or whatever and it stretched our broadband provision to breaking point. For some reason the broadband fairies decided that when bandwidth was getting tight they cut me off rather than anyone else- no idea how or why that was the case but it meant many spotty zoom calls or half finished tasks as the internet connection kept dropping out. Anyway, long story short we decided to upgrade to fibre last November.

Thanks to lockdown 3.0 and general restrictions this upgrade didn’t actually happen until the end of March (yes, when the kids had gone back to school 🙄). It was with great excitement and not some small annoyance I wanted for our AM slot (btw, when has 8am to 1pm counted as all am?!), engineers turned up at 10.30, happy days, we just need to drill a hole and pull the cabling through madam.

Dead easy, they’ll be done and I’ll be back to work in 45 minutes.

Suddenly a loud hissing fills the room, that’s odd I think, I didn’t know wind would rush in through a little hole like that. No Danielle, you cretin, that’s the gas pipe. He’s hit the gas pipe. Thoughts at this point 1. Oh god the house is going to blow up 2. Turn the electricity off 3. Does gas have a stopcock and 4. Please don’t anyone phone me because petrol stations always say that mobiles can create sparks thereby ignoring petrol forecourts the length and breadth of the country...

Needless to say this was not the speedy switchover I was hoping for. Firstly with no electricity they can’t finish the broadband so I’m without internet; secondly I realise the boiler is gas so that means no hot water; thirdly I’m prone to catastrophisation so a good slap around the face is needed.

This is nota blog about me moaning about my lack of utilities or my blatant bad luck last week, this is actually about the outstanding customer service we received as as a result of this snafu.

No names but the engineers called the gas board, gas board came and made the pipe safe (cut us off from mains supply basically), engineers came back and sorted wifi once the electricity was back on. Boss of engineers called to keep us updated, found emergency plumber who came out at 4 and spent 3 hours cutting a hole in the wall and sorting the damaged pipe. Boss of engineers text at 9 at night to check we were okay and that we were back online-and thanked us for being so moms and understanding to the engineers who has caused the issue.

It is not ideal that he drilled through the gas pipe but it was an accident. And every single thing that happened past that moment showed how much they value their customers and how much they care. That was outstanding customer service and I continued to be impressed with their follow up.

Caring about people, about your customers. Never underestimate how much that is worth.