It's been a long road for Cobb Electric Membership Cooperative after a surprise snowstorm knocked out almost half of their customers.
As of 11 p.m., that massive number had been reduced to about 600. And while many have had nothing but kind words for tireless efforts of local line workers, the battle to get through to customer service to check statuses - or even report an outage - has been met with less fanfare.
For Scott Hegg, it was a matter of dialing - and then dialing again and again.
"I've been on their application about 900 times trying to report the issue," he said.
Hegg is still up to his shins in snow and has been without power since Friday night. The temperature in his house in Mountain Park by midday on Monday had risen to 46 degrees. Hegg wanted someone with Cobb EMC to answer the phone - or his emails - to let him know something.
"Just gives you a fast busy signal whenever you call," he said.
Cobb EMC crews showed up down the street but, still, no power for him. It's day three and counting. He praised the crews but as for Cobb EMC's customer service, not so much.
"I work in I.T. for a very large public utility and we would never be unprepared like t his," Hegg said.
At one point, nearly 40 percent of Cobb EMC's customers were without power because of the snowstorm. That's 69,0000 customers.
As of Monday afternoon, all but about 1,200 customers had their power restored. That number had dropped to about 600 before midnight. On Cobb EMC's Facebook page, one customer was rejoicing on Monday that she was finally able to get through to customer service. And yet she wrote that they couldn't tell her anything.
Leslie Thompson of Cobb EMC said she has read every single criticism and she said the utility will review everything before the next storm - and next massive power outage - strikes.
"Lessons learned, what worked and what didn't and how we can improve," Thompson said. "Because, at the end of the day, we want our customers to be happy."
