City Power knocked my lights out!

Heritage Day for most people was a day to celebrate. Braais were going, music was playing and people chilled at home or at events around the country. For some, however, Heritage Day was pretty miserable and heritage night and the entire long weekend was worse and was spent in the dark.

That’s because City Power in Johannesburg decided to take anybody with negative balance showing on their account at some arbitrary date in my area and cut them off late in the afternoon just before a long weekend.

Happy Heritage Day!

City Power paid scant regard to the fact that there was a massive postal strike the month before. They gave no quarter to those who diligently paid their bills when they finally did arrive a few weeks late. They did not bother to update their account systems to reflect the status on the date they were going to switch off. They gave no thought to the millions of rands worth of food that would go off. They did not consider the alarm systems, medical equipment, electric fences, electric gates and cameras that would not function as a result of their action and the possible injuries and crimes that would ensue.

They simply turned the power off without any kind of warning.

In case you were thinking that the timing, just before a public holiday and long weekend, might be a coincidence, this is the second time in a year that I am aware of that this has been enforced in my area alone. I think the strategy is now clear. Shut people off without warning just before a long weekend. Let them languish in a powerless state (in both senses), frantically peppering the 011-375-5555 switchboard with calls only to find that if you can actually get through to speak to a less-than-interested operator with no power to do anything about it anyway, nothing can be done until Monday.

I have no doubt that bullying people is effective for City Power’s cash flow. I just wonder what the long-term reaction of the battered, jaded customer is going to be. It is probably surmised that people will then meekly learn their lesson and run wide-eyed with fear to pay their bills in future, phoning City Power in panic when the bills do not arrive.

In my particular case, I had actually paid my bill. I paid it about 3 weeks late because I did not receive it in the post as I usually do and I personally draw the line at running after people to beg them to provide me with information with which to pay them. I was not alone. Hundreds of people in my area had experienced the same issues and were shut down without warning. Some had already paid anyway like me and some had not. City Power didn’t care at all.

Let’s get the usual arguments out of the way. Firstly I am more than aware that there are many people in our country that do not have power, fridges or hot water and spend every Heritage Day in the dark. It is a travesty and should be rectified as soon as possible by the foot-dragging, service non-delivering government we are cursed to have in power. To the poor and fridgeless this may be the privileged tirade of a spoilt elitist. Fair enough. To them I say that one day when your elected government finally provides you with a fridge or the economy in which to buy one you will more than understand my bourgeois standpoint.

Secondly, my personal sympathy for this situation can only achieve so much anyway. Since we are aiming at a point where all people have these things, having them now is hardly a sin. It’s one less citizen for the government to worry about. I do not apologise for owning a fridge in South Africa in 2009.

I still demand as I did before that the government gets off its lard-hardened arse and provides said essentials for all. I hardly see a lesson in personal growth be learned of any practical value by cutting my power off. If anything, it doubly reinforces my point: government and its agencies need a doubly powerful kick in the bum for not delivering to both me and the poor.

Am I lucky to have these services? Yes I am. Do I pay for them year after year? Yes I do. Do I pay taxes so that the same services that I pay for can be supplied to others free of charge or subsidised by my taxes? Yes, once again, I do. Do I feel the need to live in a state of perpetual guilt about having these services when others do not? No I do not and, honestly, what good would it do if I did?

The government is supposed to using the money that I pay every year in tax and every month in inflated rates to address these issues but instead they take salaries that make the private sector blush, award contracts to family member’s companies that do little or no work for the millions they get paid, they feather their own nests, defraud the councils’ coffers, mismanage the funds and throw lavish lunches at fancy restaurants. I therefore respectfully ask why I should feel guilty when the people who are in the very positions to actually do something concrete about the problem couldn’t care less. I suggest that they should be feeling the guilt, not me.

For too long now the ANC government has adopted the bullshit notion that “together we can make a difference to blah blah blah — add your own simpering, inane ending here”. My part of that “together” is to pay my rates and taxes (when they bother to send me the bills). The ANC part of that together is to take my money and spend it wisely and properly for the betterment of all South Africans including me. My bills are paid in full (yes even the latest one that is the subject of this hissy fit).

So please do not insult my intelligence or the intelligence of the electorate by trying to group us together and dilute the responsibility. I personally have not been given the power by government to police, to offer medical care, to build houses for the poor, to educate or to supply any socially uplifting service that is so desperately required. When I am personally given such a task, then the ANC government may lump me in with its cadres and our destinies may be judged together.

I can guarantee you that I would be appalled and embarrassed if my record looked like theirs. I would also wear dark glasses and tint my car windows so that I would not have to look the citizens of this country in the eyes as I drove past at twice the legal speed limit. Until then, leave me out of your guilt-sharing crock-of-shit slogans. Stop trying to shift your blame by spending your lavish marketing budgets on ads laced with confusing rhetorical crap.

After managing to show my proof of payment to council (not easy when your power is off and you pay on the internet), I have finally had my power switched back on. Others are not so lucky. Many are still without power 5 days later.

Was I technically in the wrong? Maybe. That depends on the conditions of service which I am yet to uncover. The due date on my bill was 2009/10/08. I was switched off with no warning on 2009/09/23. How does that compute?

Was it my fault that their bill did not arrive? No. I have subsequently registered online to avoid this issue cropping up again but last month I expected my posted statement and it did not appear. Did the City Council and City Power act in a mature and reasonable manner in going around and switching people’s power off on the eve of Heritage Day and the long weekend straight after a postal strike? No, I would say that they acted in a vindictive, underhanded way without showing any kind of respect to the people that effectively pay their inflated salaries. They purposefully devised a strategy to hurt people as much as possible for non-payments (or postal strike induced late payments in my case) that were basically not their fault. They did it to impose a state of fear into their customer base. That’s a low blow.

So, now that I have vented, how would I have handled it?

Virtually every grown person in South Africa that owns property has a cellphone. I would have developed a database of cellphone numbers and email addresses. Should payment not have been received I would have sent a reminder with the amount owing. Bill the cost of around 25c to the home owner if you like. It would have read like this:

Dear Home Owner. We detect that your bill for August has not been paid. The amount owing is R20.00. We understand that you may not have received your bill this month but we need this amount to be settled by 10 September 2009 otherwise we will unfortunately have to switch power off to your premises on 21 September 2009. City Power.

Followed by:

Dear Home Owner. We are still showing an amount of R20.00 outstanding on your account. Please settle this immediately to avoid having services cut off on 21 September 2009. City Power.

Hey, charge an admin fee of R10 per SMS. Fair enough. I might grumble about the R10.00 but in the end I would have absolutely nothing to complain about if on 21 September after 2 warnings, City Power switched me off.

Switching people off late in the afternoon on a long weekend alienates and shows a malicious contempt for normally law-abiding citizens. Incidentally the same goes for you bastards that think it’s ok to lock up generally law abiding people on their way to work for fines that they may or may not even have received. For every guy you catch genuinely shirking his fines, you lock up and traumatise a few confused people who never got the stupid thing through the post in the first place. Stop it. Good people are not happy with you. Put that effort and efficiency into something constructive instead. You are idiots.

You see, most people want to pay their bills or at the very least realise they have to. They have a sense of civic duty as I do and generally pay loyally to the bill they receive in the post. Once in a blue moon and normally with help from you, they screw up. What is gained by alienating your paying customer base that misses one payment because of factors not under their control? What point is City Power trying to make here? It’s not like I have another option for buying electricity otherwise I would exercise my market rights to move. I am stuck with these aggressive voltage-dealing thugs and their strong-arm neo-fascist methods of exacting payment.

While we are looking at the behaviour of City Power, let’s not forget that not long ago they, in league with Eskom, were switching us off at will. Their little blackout time tables were inaccurate and their service during that period created diesel generator millionaires and almost brought the economy of South Africa to its knees. The power quality was shocking. Dips, over-voltages and surges destroyed countless appliances and made countless more fail or operate ineffectually. They cost us, the paying little gnomes that they benevolently supply, millions if not billions in unplanned outages. Not for them the humility of an organisation cowed by its own dismal service. Oh no.

Imagine there was a mechanism for me to demand the same service from City Power as they demand from me. Imagine the contract was a fair and equitable one in which my rights mirrored theirs. Imagine that if their bill was late I just stopped payment on a City Power employee’s salary on a Friday at the end of the month. No warning. When they phoned in panic to see what had happened, I programmed my computer to answer the phone and repeat “sorry, Grant can’t help you until Monday, he is experiencing a very high call volume — go to his website for your balance” in an apathetic tone until they either put the phone down or threw it against a wall.

My reaction to being treated this way is to try my very best, over time, to remove myself from the grid entirely with alternative power. At least if the power goes out, it is something I can reasonably attribute to my own actions. I will not have to deal with some mangy troglodyte deriving personal pleasure from teaching me some lesson that it barely grasps itself. The way electricity tariffs are rising, it’s going to be a viable option very, very soon.

I am tired of paying massive money to government and local government for little benefit to me or to the poor of this country for that matter. The question City Power needs to ask is if more people react like me and do the math for disconnection from the grid, who will pay the subsidies? Then they may need to reconsider the power relationship that they enjoy right now, bullying and unilaterally imposing themselves on people. I would suggest that the rest of the government’s many grinding, apathetic, useless departments do the same.

Of course, in the short term going the alternative power route may suit Eskom … until it comes time to pay for the massive investments they are making right now. By then everybody who can afford to be might have grumpily left the grid. I predict there will be a massive change in their current ad campaign in which Eskom is paying big money in our media to drive away their customers (that’s got to be a world first).

Sinister footnote:

It also turns out that City Power has outsourced the switching on and off of power to a private company. They will not divulge the name of this company or give you a contact number for them. This company is paid per disconnection and reconnection. A cynic such as myself has to wonder therefore, when private profit is to be made from switching people on and off whether it is now in the interests of those involved to follow a fair and reasonable protocol in doing so or does one not simply maximise profit by switching as many people off and then on as possible. One way to do that is to switch off as many marginal cases as possible. Blink and you are off, your fault or not. Pay up including a nice juicy reconnection fee and you get switched back on. Why be reasonable when the customer has no recourse and there is good money to be made.

Or perhaps I am just a bitter, late-payer with no leg to stand on that just needed to vent …