Customers blow fuse after utilities appear to pull plug on service

By David Mendell Tribune Staff Writer October 22, 2000 A generation ago, the power never seemed to go out on a sunny summer day.

If you were changing residences, you called the phone company on Wednesday and a dial tone would greet you at the new place Sunday.

And until this summer, any thought of a harmful metal being spilled in the garage by the local gas company was out of the question.

So what gives with this new generation of utilities and Baby Bells, which seem to stumble when trying to provide simple, basic services? In this era of deregulation, aren't these erstwhile monopolies-turned-free market enterprises supposed to operate leaner and meaner, offering efficient service at blue-light special prices?

Instead, executives of essential service providers such as Commonwealth Edison, Ameritech and Nicor Gas have been forced to issue mea culpas to the public for collapses in everything from power distribution to telephone repairs.

They have done so because of countless horror stories of everyday people who have become entangled in what seems like a utility infrastructure gone haywire. Ameritech service delays can take weeks. An aging power distribution system has seemingly threatened to knock out electricity almost any place at any time. And Nicor is testing thousands of homes for spilled mercury from its regulators and meters.

"Listen, I'm sensitive to some of the challenges the companies face today, but to recognize that something is busted and not to do anything about it, well, it is just infuriating," said Sean Essex, a Northwest Side homeowner who this year suffered two separate cases of utility anxiety.

Essex said he fought with Ameritech for weeks to get a toll-free business line in his house, and with Peoples Energy, which he said sends him faulty monthly bills.

"It's all just frustrating," Essex said. "To me, part of it seems to be that they are all trying to make the transition to be competitive and not regulated, and the challenges to do that keep management busy. I also think the old technologies are antiquated and don't talk to the new ones, like the phone billing system."

Essex might just be on target, although that's a simplified version of a more complicated story, consumer experts say.

Though each business has unique circumstances, some consumer advocates noted a common thread running through industries with recent consumer debaclesderegulation.

Communications firms and utilities are under less government scrutiny and, thus, have largely focused their energy on expanding industrial empires and gaining new customers rather than pleasing old customers, consumer advocates contend.

For instance, as Chicago's local phone company, Ameritech is fighting two battles. To remain competitive, it is pushing to become a long-distance carrier, while trying to fend off other phone companies from moving into its local carrier markets in five Midwestern states.

Competition has kept phone fees in check, but seemingly pushed service to a lower tier, at least for Ameritech, critics said.

Martin Cohen, executive director of the non-profit Citizens Utilities Board, has accused Ameritech of misreporting its service record and unsuccessfully lobbied the Illinois Commerce Commission to order an audit. He said he "would hesitate" to draw too many conclusions that weakened regulation is the sole cause of all service headaches.

"But it is true that they used to be fully regulated monopolies, and they no longer are," Cohen observed, with little hesitation. "They are focused on becoming competitors in the new marketplace, and that's much different than just providing plain old utility service. Also, management is now far removed from the community they are serving and they're running a national or multinational corporation.

"Consumers are the worse for all of this," he said.

Letitia Johnson, a South Side beautician, admits she is no expert on market competition, but she knows this much: Her newly bought house has no heat, and she blames the phone company.

Johnson said an Ameritech technician mangled her thermostat's wiring system in June when he was asked to install phone jacks in the kitchen and bedroom. The technician inexplicably placed a line on the dining room wall above the thermostat, she said. Wires dangle from the wall and her furnace hasn't worked since, she said.

She said she spent all of August haggling with the company, and an Ameritech supervisor eventually apologized and said the company would pay the estimated $175 for an electrician to fix the wiring. That has yet to happen, she said.

"One older man told me they are rushing younger people through training too fast and the younger people don't know what they are doing," Johnson said. "What was this man thinking? I don't know why anyone would want a telephone in the dining room anyway. I really couldn't believe it."

Johnson said that during the recent cold snap, she heated the house with her oven, but now that's gone out too. Raising three children under 12 years old, she said she doesn't have $175 available.

"I know when it was snowing that the Ameritech people all had heat," she said, "and I was huddled around the stove freezing."

An Ameritech spokesman said the company doesn't comment on individual customer complaints. Still, this is precisely the type of situation that brought Edward Whitacre Jr. to Chicago last week.

The chairman of San Antonio-based SBC Communications Inc., which last year completed a takeover of Ameritech, apologized to state regulators for its poor service and promised it will be remedied by year's end.

Through early retirements, SBC shrank Ameritech's technical staff by 11 percent, to 20,500 workers, from spring 1998 to January, Whitacre said. The company has hired hundreds of technicians, and the list of 210,000 service orders from several weeks ago has been reduced to 137,000.

"I think people are willing to forgive and give us a second chance," Whitacre told regulators.

The chief executive officer obviously did not pay a visit to Brenda Weis while in town. Still fuming over her Ameritech experience, Weis is in no mood to forgive.

She said Ameritech workers blew out her phone line for several days when trying to install another line in her Lincolnshire home for a satellite television service connection.

After repeated visits from workers in both the company's repair and new installation departments "They don't talk to each other," she grousedand hours of listening to the drone of Muzak while waiting for a service representative, Weis said her husband fixed what a technician could not.

That was nearly 70 days after the first Ameritech worker appeared on the scene, she said. "They don't have anything but contempt for the customer, and all they seem to be interested in is the bottom line and their earnings," Weis said. "It is just appalling. I have never seen such rank stupidity."

Those are harsh words, but they are mild compared with the expletives Chicagoans have hurled at the area's power utility in recent years.

Critics of ComEd said its record has improved considerably this year after the high-profile power failures of the late 1990s. That's when the company threatened rolling blackouts because its power grid was surging past overload, the result of decades of neglect.

ComEd is halfway through a $1.9 billion plan to upgrade its distribution system. But that didn't stop power from being sapped downtown Oct. 8 after a circuit breaker exploded at a key substation.

Howard Learner, a Chicago environmental attorney who has monitored ComEd for years, contends the utility, like the communications companies, has overextended itself, losing sight of its primary mission. He also suggested that staff reductions in the mid-1990s left the company with an institutional brain drain in middle management.

"The system of providing electricitythe basic job of this companyis broken," said Learner, executive director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center.

While other utilities have drifted from consumer service, ComEd has responded to public outcry and made service its top priority, responded Arlene Juracek, a ComEd vice president. She conceded that too much data was stored in managers' heads and in paper files. The utility is implementing a new data computer system, she said.

CUB's Cohen, meanwhile, isn't necessarily pessimistic about waking up the morning after these utility nightmares.

As everyone tries to navigate this new course into softened regulation, there are bound to be problems. Cohen advocates more government intervention, specifically a boost in penalties for insufficient service, although he said this suggestion has been met with resistance from state lawmakers crafting a new telecommunications law. This year, Ameritech is expected to face fines of more than $30 million from Illinois alone.

Cohen predicted natural gas will be the next great utility-activated crisis.

After the industry was deregulated in the 1980s, the cost of natural gas fell precipitously. But after years of suppressed gas prices, producers haven't kept pace with demand, pushing prices back up. It could take more than a year for production to catch up and for gas bills to subside, Cohen said.

In other words, pray for a mild winter.

"You need to find the right combination of effective competition and effective regulation of these industries, and we're still feeling our way there," Cohen said. "We're all guinea pigs in an experiment that has no certain outcome."

http://chicagotribune.com/news/metro/chicago/article/0,2669,ART-47561,FF.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), October 22, 2000

Answers

I would venture a guess that y2k problems have played a small role in this; though nobody will acknowledge it.

-- Nancy7 (nancy7@hotmail.com), October 22, 2000.

Ameritech from the archives:

The company updated its software last year
to make it Y2K-compliant. But the software
had bugs and introduced errors into the system.

********************************************

A hardware problem that took two days to
correct made Ameritech Corp.'s voice mail
service clunky and cumbersome for residential
and business customers.

********************************************

The snafu, blamed on a computer glitch, is the
latest in a string of billing and service
problems tied to Ameritech. The computer glitch
occurred during a system upgrade.

********************************************

A total of 18,700 customers of Ameritech in the
new 262 area code were charged incorrectly
because of a billing glitch last month, state
regulators said Tuesday.

********************************************

"They always blame the squirrels - that they
always eat through the wires," Deininger
groused. "It never was this bad. Never, never."

********************************************

Overall, 76,849 customers said they were without a dial
tone sometime between May and July, a 26 percent
jump in out-of-service calls over last year, the company
said.

********************************************

"The customer-service problems Ameritech is
having are a relatively recent phenomenon,"
he said. "High fines and hasty legislation
won't do anything to improve customer service."

-- spider (spider0@usa.net), October 22, 2000.