Estimated

I was on a video call Wednesday, when there was a "boom!" and the power went down. It came back up after a moment, was live for a couple of minutes, then flicker, flicker... and blackout. Again.

"Well, so much for cooking dinner," I said to myself, and prepared to go out. Before I left, I checked Puget Sound Energy's outage map. Sure enough, the neighborhood was in red. Cause: Under Investigation. Estimate for restoration, 7 pm, a little more than two hours out. At 6:25, while still away from the apartment, I checked again. Still under investigation, still estimated for 7. I get to the off-ramp nearest my place about an hour later. The traffic lights are out. And if those lights are blacked out, that means the apartment is still blacked out. Sure enough, home is dark when I arrive. New ETA: 9 pm, but the cause had been updated to "trees/vegetation." I checked again right about 9. At 8:50, the estimate had been pushed to 11 pm. I was starting to notice a pattern. Sure enough, an update at 10:40 pushed the ETA to 1 am. The power actually came back on at 11:30. (A remarkable number of things in my apartment make noise when they start receiving power...)

I've done three years of support escalations, and I understand what it's like to have angry customers wanting immediate answers. And so I understand the impulse to have something available for people, even if it turns out to be unreliable. It's a hard spot for a company to be in, because one can't please all of the customers all of the time. This is where flexibility comes into the picture, because PSE's problem was that it had one way to communicate with the public, and that one-size-fits-all communication winds up being a very poor fit for some. This is the sort of thing that customer profiling would be excellent for. While I'm the sort to be okay with "We have no idea how long this will take from this point, but past outages lasted an average of X," other people may actually prefer the rolling ETAs, even if the data turns out to be inaccurate.

But I expect that companies don't see as immediate profit potential in incident communication styles as they do in buying habits. It is, however, worth noting that the two can be linked. I'm honestly considering moving, simply due to the impression that PSE has difficulty keeping the lights on in even mildly inclement weather. I might have to, in order to communicate to PSE that I'm not confident in them.