I just finished reading your column entitled, “Business or government, it's hard to reach a human anymore [The Citizen, July 28].” First, let me thank you for alerting us to the fact that we're not listed in the Fayette white pages of the BellSouth telephone book; it seems our problems with BellSouth are even larger than we knew.

Secondly, I wish that there had been something I or Coweta-Fayette EMC could have done for you — and all of the other people — on Saturday, July 24, when heavy storms caused the outages in Fayette County.

Unfortunately, Mr. Beverly, we didn't become aware of the message telling people our phones had not been connected until mid-day Saturday. We immediately called BellSouth, who did not repair the problem until mid-day Sunday, well after we had restored power after Saturday evening's storms.

We are as perplexed as you are about our telephone service; we have had the same phone number for the last seven to eight years, and our telephone bill is a large one each month. During the period that the erroneous message was on the EMC's telephone line, board members, management staff and I received telephone calls at home throughout the night. Like you, we were not at all pleased with the service that our member/customers were getting, yet our hands were tied.

“Murphy's Law” does work. On Friday [July 23] we converted our incoming telephone trunks to have Caller ID at our telephone switch. This will enable us in the future to automatically take power outage information and improve our customer service during the day as we instantly recognize customer calls.

However, BellSouth did not make the proper connection before they left and our main telephone number had the recording of “this number is not yet connected.” Since they did this work after hours Friday, we did not catch the problem until the following morning. Unfortunately, it took an additional 24 hours to correct BellSouth's error.

Again, please accept our apology and know that whenever there is an electrical outage, our linemen are out there working hard to restore your power. And although we couldn't help it that our telephones were out of order [that] weekend, we're sorry for the inconvenience.

Michael C. Whiteside

President and CEO

Coweta-Fayette EMC

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