Thursday, May 31, 2012

The opaque workings of Kenya Power...

Since the beginning of this week, our redoubtable 'power' company has again started it's obnoxious business of plunging most of North Coast into darkness without a word of warning, apology or explanation.

As usual, their phones go unanswered for HOURS on end and when finally, one is picked up, they can offer no explanation or even be able to tell us when we'll return to the 21st Century, again from the dark ages!

It seems that Kenya Power, like the National Security, has a policy of being highly secretive about it's operations. The last time (about a week ago), when they gave a full page advert/explanation by their CEO in the Weekend Star, I even felt a twinge of guilt for picking on them everytime we have an outage, but, not anymore. Not after the past couple of days and especially today.

How can a power company which charges an arm and a leg function in such an unprofessional, unethical, irresponsible and haphazard manner? How dare they have such insolent employees who do not care about answering their phones, who have phantom emergency numbers which hardly ever work or are answered effectively (they have discovered the automated answer system which tells you to wait till a line is free and one can hold on for ages as though one was calling a toll-free number), and satisfactorily from the customer's point of view, of course.

In fact, should we miraculously manage to get through to a human at the emergency number, we will find that they are totally at sea regarding your outage! They are a very frustrating lot while some are quite impertinent, too.

Just before I started writing this email, we had two very quick outages of a couple of minutes. Why? After all, we haven't had power most of the day starting very early in the morning around 4.30 am. Of course, as I mentioned earlier we've been having early morning outages the past couple of days and also later in the evening around sunset. And while today's first outage lasted for nearly 5 hours (it came back at around 10.45 am), we lost it again, after an hour, and it continued that way - off and on for most of the day.

How long is this going to continue and at what point will Kenya Power get its act together and give us a continuous and predictable supply without suddenly without warning force us to travel through time (they've discovered the secret of time travel of science fiction!), when artificial light/electricity had not been discovered, yet?

And yes, those people of yester years were also as uncouth as the employees of Kenya Power in the way they treated others.

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