Service today can sometimes be not as good as we could hope for, but a member of my family had a fault with the electrical supply cable to his house.
It happened last Saturday afternoon when the power went off. Freezing cold and snowing. He rang the electrical company, a UK call centre and within an hour, the man from Scottish and Southern Electric was knocking on his door. The fault was located in the road, so the house was connected by emergency cable to the street light on the edge of his property. Temporary power on by 7:00 pm Saturday evening.
The team from SSE turned up with their digger Sunday morning and by lunchtime in the freezing cold, they had laid a new cable, jointed it up and the power was back on.

Great service but Tuesday, by some strange coincidence,  exactly the same thing happened  at my house. No electric at the meter. Phoned the UK call centre who were really helpful, man with me within an hour, two calls from SSE to my mobile to let me know what was going on. Team turned up that afternoon with the digger, located the break, dug a big hole, rejointed the cable and finished at 7:30 pm, power back on.

What a result , the guys were really cheerful and helpful and really cared about what they were doing. So refreshing when often one is passed from person to person and it’s a struggle to get even the most basic service.

Full marks to Scottish and Southern.

It's a shame that BT aren't as good as this.  We have been waiting for almost a month for them to reconnect my workplace after joyriders took out the telegraph pole outside.

I had a little smile to myself today. Whilst the electricity was back on pronto, I still have a hole in the path outside the house.
This rectification appears to be the job carried out by the re-instatement team and when a SSE van turned up with two people today, I assumed this was they.  Wrong, it was actually the safety team who put a cover over the new bit of electric cable running a foot up the outside wall. Took all of ten minutes.
The re-instatement team are nothing to do with them but "will be along later".

What would we do without the Brtitish bugbear, demarcation. It's what killed our shipyards so we should not be surprised.

I'm still waiting for the re-instatement team to remove their plastic barriers and fill in the hole and make good. They seem to work to a different time scale to their opposite numbers.