Saturday night I arrived late at our house having taken our older son to his first tennis “tournament."  Everyone else was already asleep and the house was dark.  I tried to turn some lights on, only to discover that we had a power outage!  After some back and forth, I finally managed to get Con Edison to dispatch someone.  A ConEd guy showed up at 1am and determined that the main circuit breaker in our house had somehow decided to stop working for no apparent reason.  Not ConEd’s problem.  Since I was super tired, I decided to get some sleep.  Up at 7am the house was freezing and I started dialing for an electrician (grateful for having a UPS to power my cable modem!).

That’s where the fun really started.  I first called our regular electrician and got voice mail.  Left a message to have him call me back.  Then I must have dialed at least a dozen of electricians – every local ad that promised 24x7 emergency service.  I got either nothing, a voice mail, or in one case a hopeless answering service.  Huh?  Definitely anything but 24x7!  I had skipped one unattractive ad – but now went back to that.  Ring, ring, then slightly groggy "Hello, how can we help you?"  Knowledgeable and courteous owner on the phone, he immediately dispatched one of his guys and one hour later I had someone at the house working on the issue.  Another 30 minutes later we had partial power back and most importantly a working furnace!

Never heard back from our regular electrician, who no longer is that (I left a follow up voice mail).  The guy who answered will get all my business going forward.

This little episode really brought home (so to speak) how important responsive service is for anything that’s mission critical.  It’s OK for my gardener to take a message, but definitely not for my electrician.  The same is true for web services and software.  It’s OK if my personal blog is down for a short time and I can’t reach Tumblr, but if Etsy can’t connect to PayPal then lots of individuals stand to lose sales.  I am mentioning PayPal because, much like other Internet giants, they are not necessarily known for responsive service.  At least though from my London hotel room a google search for "paypal customer service” brings up the PayPal site as the first result – not so for google itself! Often there is no choice of course (e.g. PayPal, Google), but when there is, it’s definitely a good idea to keep service responsiveness in mind when choosing a provider for anything mission critical.