EDF

It should be error delay and frustration and that is the most fun you can have with EDF (or Electricity de France)

If life was a monopoly board this is one utility company whose card you would leave well alone, but at times you may also be driven to rip it to pieces and burn the bits left and then scatter the ashes to the four winds.

If you have ever tried to get a new electricity connection then you might know how I feel. This is one of the less pleasurable aspects of what I do.

Client J bought a renovated property in St Gervais through us at chaletdoctors and part of the service we offer is to do everything that needs doing for the client. In this case as it was a renovation EDF oblige you to get a certificate of conformity, which is brilliant and a jolly good idea.

Except try getting one. You phone EDF with the reference numbers of the meters that they put in and try a few that you have invented for good measure and they have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I think I would have been better off calling my mate Dave in London, at least I could have had a pleasant chat.

I am convinced that EDF's "customer services" compete with France Telecom's to do the most disservice to that department's appelation. But I think EDF edge the competition because they don't even talk to their own people, let alone us punters. Certainly not their technical department, whose simple task it was to meet me at the address in St Gervais between 1330 hrs and 1500hrs a few days ago.

Having given my contact details when I took the slot allocated by EDF and made sure that they had recorded my mobile number correctly, I dutifully hung around St Gervais, which is a pleasant little ski town, so normally no great task.

Eternal pessimist that I am, when it it comes to monolithic utility companies, anyway. I rang EDF just to make sure that I had not been forgotten, amazingly the pleasant lady at the other end even recited my mobile number and confirmed that it was all go and said that I would be contacted if there was any problem. I almost tipped my noisette down my front in shock.

Relishing the thought that at last they were actually going to fulfill a task at the first asking I allowed my thoughts to wander and briefly I thought of a brave new bureaucratic world where achievements were made and light switches could actually work.

Lost as I was in this fantasy. Before I knew it, we had arrived at and accelerated past the witching hour, but as this was France I allowed an extra 20 minutes for the j'arrive factor (this is what any French persons says when they are late, you expect that to mean 2 minutes they mean anytime in the next hour). My French colleague Laurence is a master at it, but us brits are pants. You say j'arrive and you do.

Anyway I digress, back to the debacle. So I ring EDF and point out J's lack of electricity and am stunned to be informed that the technician had been and gone. Cue apoplexy and steam contained within a shell of external calm (Miles - learn the lesson never shout at people in a public street in inadequate French - it just makes you look silly and achieves nothing and you know deep down the person to whom you are thinking vitriol but enouncing pleasantries is just gallicly shrugging their life away)

Having feebly accepted the new rendezvous sometime hence I was left to reflect on the waste of my life at that point and I concluded that there must be some new EDF think tank out there whose participants have come to the realisation that just as there is light and dark in the world - and that they have something to do with it, there is also late and early. They must have come up with the premise that they can't stop being late, after all they are French and a French utility company, so what to do? "I know, we can be early as well - that cancels all that late stuff out"

And I reckon that is what happened.



OK they are not all that bad - there are a few lights on in France.

Miles Jefferson
www.chaletdoctors.com
For all your property needs in the French alps