PEPCO keeps its word

By I.J. Hudson

Is it magic?  Is it social media?  Is it coincidence?

The answers could be, “probably not,” “maybe,” and “unfortunately, yes.”

The last post whined a bit about PEPCO’s tree-trimming program.  Maybe their folks read it – or maybe not.

Background:  I gave permission for PEPCO to take down a couple of pine trees that could interfere with their lines in my neighborhood.  My beef:  they took down the trees and left the proceeds on the ground for two weeks – nobody considers “free wood” a bargain when it’s pine.

I wondered, “What lies beneath?”  Has my grass been killed?  Is there a major landscaping job to be done (paid for)? 

Well today, tah-dah, the crew came through and picked up the dismembered pine trees.  Yayyy!  That’s good news.   

 

The pictures show that damage to my lawn, IMO, is minimal – not a big deal;  certainly not enough to fuss about.  

But for the social media gurus out there, how could this have played out as a big-time advantage for PEPCO?

Hmmm?  I can’t pretend that I know everything PEPCO has been/is doing with social media, but I might have sent a crew around to record interviews with customers as the contractors took down trees, let PEPCO talk about the tree trimming programs and the customers talk about giving up some branches and some trees for reliability (if it really helps that much.)

---And let people complain “on camera” about PEPCO, its service, outages during blue sky days, trees toppled but left on the ground – and answer those complaints --- directly and honestly.  

Trust is based on long-term relationships.  It takes years to earn it; only a few minutes to destroy it.  If I were PEPCO, I would start building it slowly - under promise and over deliver.  Keep the dialogue between the real people of PEPCO and customers totally in the open.

The deal

PEPCO eventually did what it promised it would do – written down on a little piece of paper I signed back in March.  But no one would know about it, unless I wrote about it.  Yeah, I complained.  We all do.  But I also am giving PEPCO credit for following through.  PEPCO should give itself credit, too.  

Silence these days is foolish, not golden.  You need converts - people who were complaining now saying, "Thanks, you did what you said you would do."   

That conversation needs to be out in the open so people can see how a big company deals with the good, the bad – and the….well, me.

Pine-ing for a Pickup.

By I.J. Hudson

You may recall PEPCO announced it would be more aggressive in its infrastructure replacement/repair and tree trimming efforts to reduce power outages.  I received a letter citing some improvements in the wires/insulators/electrical stuff in my neighborhood.  Glad to hear it.  Thanks.

I am also part of the tree trimming campaign.  They asked if they could take down two of my trees that were “involved” with the lines, and I signed on the dotted line.  They would take down and remove the trees - for free. It would all start in about a month.

Looking very skinny

Sure enough, about six weeks later, the first contractor came through and trimmed the branches off the main “trunk.” (4/27) That left the trees looking like slightly deformed spears.   

A few days later(4/30), a second crew came through armed with serious chain saw:  both trees came down ----  each section lowered gently to the ground. 

Free Wood!   Not happening.

I must confess I had mixed emotions about losing these trees.  One of them had served as a “support” for one end of an amateur radio wire antenna for a bunch of years.  It’s hard to find a good 65-foot tall support.   

Now there is a lot of empty space at 65 feet, and I’m still figuring out what to do about the antenna. 

However, two weeks later, there is still a lot of tree on the ground.  tree sections have been occupying a lot of lawn space, and no one, it seems, wants free pine.  It doesn’t burn so well in the fireplace, etc.  

No doubt the grass below has been complaining to no avail, and likely has given up under pressure.  My Superman cape remains at the dry cleaners so I haven’t tried to lift or roll these sections to check the health of the grass underneath.

While the contractors lowered each section they cut to the ground, I suspect there are indentations in the lawn to mark the day.  My son found one last weekend as we played Frisbee on the lawn.  His foot found it.  Luckily, he didn’t twist his ankle, and I filled the hole with topsoil.

The deal was – complete removal and clean up of the trees.                            

I’m grateful the trees are down (I guess), and await the “complete removal and clean up” part.  

I guess there’s a logjam of work to be done, and a lot of us in the same boat.

If it leads to fewer power outages, I can wait a while longer for the logs 

to be picked up, but I'm a little concerned about 

                "What Lies Beneath."

Caught between Yesterday and Tomorrow - Fee, Fee, FI, Fo, Fum - FiOS or Landline?

By I.J. Hudson

A lot of organizations have different divisions, different silos, that don’t communicate with each other very well – or, not at all.  And sometimes they seem to do it in a deliberate strategic way.  A case in point is Verizon.

You may remember them as Bell-Atlantic, but these days they’re doing business as Verizon Wireless, FiOS, and just plain Verizon (landline). 

Okay, let’s look at this movie 15 years ago.  Verizon’s T-1 business was drooping because of DSL (several competitors).  Verizon was faced with cannibalizing its T-!  market to push DSL in the face of very strong cable competition.  In the DC area, Comcast kept getting faster;  DSL, not so much.

Fast forward to today.  Verizon FiOS is trying to compete against cable – both offering bundled services (phone, Internet, TV) and each running ads that snipe at the other guy.  And, at the same time Verizon has been fighting cable and satellite, Verizon has other in-house competitors – Verizon Wireless and Verizon FiOS.  Wait – that sounds confusing.  Of course it is.  Verizon is fighting real competitors and itself – competition from its past and its future.

Why do I mention this?  I’m a sandwich generation guy.  I’m a baby boomer:  older parents, kids with kids.  Gosh, I’m a grandfather.  And, because of my location, I’m caught between Verizon’s squabble with itself.

I’ve had a land line since there was land and phone numbers had five digits.  I’ve had the same number for decades, even though I get an occasional call for Pier One Imports. (wonder why directory assistance hasn’t changed that yet?)

The problem is that my landline gets a lot of static when it rains, and then the phone quits altogether.  We‘ve reported it a bunch of times.  And every time it turns out, “the trouble is not in our set,” and after a few hours or a day or two, the “infrastructure” dries out and the dial tone returns.  Privately, linemen I’ve talked to say, ‘hey, your lines and stuff are old.  They’re not going to invest in fixing up the old stuff when they’re bringing  FiOS to your neighborhood in the next year or two.”  

That means I can:

1)      Maintain my land line service and put up with spotty/no service when it rains.  Gosh, how often can it rain?

2)      Drop the landline and go totally wireless, like a growing number of folks.  Not a great idea in my situation because cell coverage at the house isn’t great.

Does bringing FiOS to my neighborhood solve the problem?   Only if I decide FiOS makes sense.  Will I really have to give up the copper and depend on fiber.

Okay, fiber is not the problem.  Did I mention I’m also served by PEPCO and have frequent power outages.  That means if I switched phone/TV/Internet to FiOS, I’d be totally offline during a power outage – at the mercy of backup batteries, etc.  At least with the land line (and the rain hasn’t killed my service yet) Verizon is supplying voltage that keeps the land line working even though the power is off.  And you thought phones were powered by natural gas.

I’m almost ready to cut the wire – which wire??  And do I really want to leave copper for the land of fiber optics?  Oops.   I hear a beeping in the background – my battery backup is toast. Time for the generator.

Two steps forward; one step back.  How's the cell service? How's the copper?  Is the infrastructure sound enough to earn my confidence?

(Donald Trump !!!!  just to get your attention.)

Retweeting - When it Involves "Facts," Be Sure the Source is Right!

By I.J. Hudson

I gave a young reporter an idea for a blog post the other day.  And he wrote it.  However, I think I’d better write it myself.  It’s about “telephone.” (Remember when we had just telephones?)

You may remember this game from childhood.  Someone starts it by whispering something to the person next to them; that person whispers the information to the next person, etc.  Everyone then laughs as the last person in the line repeats the information after it has been “filtered” through all the people playing in the game – their “nuances” added.  The original story changed according to what the previous people thought they heard.  The facts OUT did not always match the facts IN.   

The new telephone game is called, retweeting – it’s the same game, but the problem is that retweeting copies the information IN perfectly.  (Note:  I did not say “facts”)

So what’s the point, I.J.?  It’s really pretty simply.  There is no denying Twitter and retweeting can spread a great idea and cause change.  But “copy and paste” social media can be very thin, inaccurate and be spread robotically by well-meaning folks. 

It’s one thing to retweet an idea; it’s an entirely different story when you retweet blindly..  Just because someone you follow says something -- doesn’t make it true.  Case in point:

I've been following the recent flooding along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers with great interest.  I grew up near the confluence of those two rivers,  have family back there, know how to pronounce the names of the local towns in “Little Egypt.”  I followed the flooding, river stages, Army Corps of Engineers releases – everything I could find.  And when the Corps decided to blow up a levee on the Southeast Missouri side, I was dumbfounded to see on twitter (by one account) that they had blown up a levee on the Cairo, IL side. Then dozens of people simply retweeted that one account containing inaccurate information.  They didn’t do any fact-checking, just whispered in the ear of the next guy exactly what the first guy had gotten wrong.  Mistakes went viral.

It’s really no different from what happened during my latter TV days.  A copy mistake in an early morning newscast could be “copied and pasted” to subsequent newscasts - the error repeated all day long – until/unless someone looked at the content closely and said, “wait, we need to correct this.”

The same thing happened this week when a variety of news media in Baltimore and Washington re-tweeted/copied ONE story from AP about MARC trains running late because a sewage pipe had broken somewhere between Rockville and Garrett Park.  All of the news media parroted the AP story.  Every  link provided by the various tweeters went to the AP story.  The story itself was vague and begged for answers.  And it had errors.  There was no break, although there was odor near Twinbrook Metro caused by a missing manhole.  To his/her credit, at least one reporter actually made phone calls and asked questions.  Obviously, others just repeated what they had seen on twitter or in other publications who had just copied what they saw somewhere else.

Call it "misinformation cloning." (Please give me credit for inventing that phrase :}).  It's almost a river of misinformation because the errors appear in the twitter streams of everyone who retweets the bad information....and it spreads, and spreads.

Please.  If you’re interested in reporting facts, in accuracy, don’t copy and paste.   Be a reporter. Get sources.  And if you’re part of a group that shares information among different neighborhood websites, be darn sure you’ve got it right before sharing it with the other folks.  The truth multiplied can be very powerful; unchecked facts multiplied can be harmful.