Don't Treat Customers Doing Good Deeds Like Idiots

This is a special message for the El Toro Water District, the local agency that handles water in my area. Hopefully they Google their name every now and then to see if they've shown up in the news or on a blog somewhere.

Around midnight last night I woke up and thought I heard a lot of water running down the storm drain outside. It wasn't raining and in my groggy state I assumed the sprinklers must be running across the street. I awoke again a couple of hours later and the water was still gushing at a good rate.

At 5:30 this morning I got up, still to sound of the gusher outside. I took a walk in the darkness and found that water was running at a high rate behind the homes across the way and down the storm drain. I couldn't see the source, but this was clearly an unusual situation.

As it got light and my wife was leaving, she came upstairs and mentioned how much water was running out there and I thought I would do my civic duty and call ETWD and let them know about it. After all, we have a drought in California and every gallon that was running down that drain was being wasted (and probably many gallons per minute).

I called ETWD and used their emergency message line to let them know about the problem. A couple minutes later somebody called to ask me about it. I patiently tried to explain the location of where the water was running as the ETWD tech questioned me like I was a complete idiot. I clearly was inconveniencing him.

At one point I was ready to hang up on the guy myself. I'm trying to do them a favor by pointing out a wasteful and potentially damaging water problem (there's a slope where the water was running and I didn't want the area undermined), and his tone to me was one of disbelief and almost mocking the seriousness of the issue. Maybe he was just tired and didn't want to get called out early in the morning, but it wasn't my problem. Somebody paid for a whole lot of wasted water last night and I was trying to stop it.

A truck showed up and after looking at the running drain headed to another part of the street where I assume the water was coming from. Within a few minutes the gushing flow had stopped. Whatever it was, it apparently didn't take a lot of effort stop the waterflow. I never heard anything back from ETWD as to the source, or even a thank-you for reporting it.

The problem with monopolistic governmental agencies is they don't realize they're in the customer service business even if they have no competition for their services. The tend to take their customers for granted.

If a customer is trying to do you a favor by reporting a problem - one that doesn't even affect him directly - the least you can do is show some appreciation for the effort.

And for Pete's sake, don't treat them like idiots. The next time there's water gushing down this street, and I don't care if there's an ark floating in it, I'm not calling.

ETWD, I have a simple suggestion: When you call back a customer on a trouble report like this, start this way: "Thank you for taking the time to report this problem. Can you tell me where it is and what you're seeing?"

That would have made the whole conversation come out better for both parties.