The New Leader

...in awful customer service is not a bank in China. Anyone who has dealt with anything more than a simple deposit or withdrawal at a bank in China knows that customer service is not even a thought. And yet, today I found something worse.

We need to have electricity and gas in our new apartment, which means we have to call PSE&G to open a new account and get everything turned on (though the lights are on in the apartment right now because they never turned them off). I've tried getting through to PSE&G, but it's not that easy to stay on the phone for 40 minutes while they tell you that they'll get to your call when they can.

While we would like to live in our new apartment tomorrow, I was told that they can't come to turn on the electricity or gas until next Thursday between 8am and 4pm. Even Comcast (also known as one of the worst companies for customer service in America) provides a smaller window for their service. Honestly, how difficult is it to turn on these services? I know it's not rocket science. Maybe PSE&G could take the money that everyone in the area HAS to pay them and hire some more staff to actually do some work.

To put this in perspective, when I lived in Colorado I had to go through Xcel Energy. The property management company told me to call and transfer all the bills to my name. I called, waited a short amount of time and set everything up in a few minutes. No one ever had to come to my apartment and I never had any disruption of service.

So, it appears that we can move our stuff into the apartment tomorrow; we just can't live there until sometime next week.