Scribbling

At the risk of appearing cynical, a practice implicit in the nature of corporations is the pursuit of anonymity from their customer base. The corporation goes to great lengths, including substantial financial expenditures, to keep a favorable image prominently displayed before the general public; however, corporations exercise a considerable degree of avarice when it comes to the free flow of information from the consumer/customer to the corporation.
Last summer, Piedmont Natural Gas supplied natural gas service to a seventy-two unit development under construction in our neighborhood. I don’t how the decision was made but PNG decided to bury the gas lines on our side of the street into a part of the land under development. None of the homeowners in our neighborhood were consulted with regard to the location of the lines. The front of our property was torn up for a couple of weeks with large machinery immobilized by the sheer enormity of the veins of rock lurking beneath the surface of the ground. Rather than stay within the right of way allocated for the burial of such service lines, the gas company opted not to move the telephone and cable service to locate the gas lines which are placed deeper that the other lines, it choose instead, and without permission, to dig into our property to bury the gas lines. I could have forgiven this inconsiderate behavior if PNG had restored my property to its original state: proper sloping grade and sewn with grass. What has resulted is a complete mess. The front of our property is being eroded as a result of improper grading and failure to seed the property once the gas line was buried. The workman assured us that they would return to do the grading and seeding properly. It has been a year since that promise was made and nothing has been done to address the problem.
Two weeks ago, I began calling PNG to report the deteriorating condition of the land on the road front of our property. Although the work was done locally by the division out of the county in which I reside, Guilford County, there was no local number available to report my problem –I didn’t fall into the category of current customer with a billing issue, etc. All access numbers were 800 numbers that I am certain provided access to a call center somewhere in the US. I explained my situation with a customer service person who had a difficult time understanding my plight although she finally had me connected to a PNG division located in a neighboring county. Of course the person to whom I was being connected was not in the office so I left a voice mail giving my number and a brief statement of my problem. While I was out, the gas company official returned my call, in turn leaving me a confused message, which he concluded by leaving his number but with an incomplete number of digits –local numbers require seven digits, not six! I had to call another 800 number and go through the whole process again. Late in the day I actually received another call from the man who had previously given me his incomplete telephone number. He reiterated the confusion he had stated in his earlier call but seemed a little better when I went over my problem step by step. He recognized that the work was done by another division assigned to my county and said he would get the proper people involved to rectify the situation. No one had called since our conversation. I will attempt emailing to the only email addresses listed for Piedmont Natural Gas in my area. If my efforts fail to produce any subsequent action, I will be left with the only gesture that seems to be effective with large corporations: contact the CEO and executive officers of the corporation directly. Everyone in the company protests that a remedy would have been more quickly forthcoming had the natural chain of command been followed despite its evident failure which led to the “nuclear option” of going straight to the top.