Memphis Light Gas and Water

Activated service on the phone. Representative seemed bored or aggravated. Was told I had to fill out a form that would be mailed to me and that it MUST be returned within 30 days or my service would be interrupted whether my account was current or not. Never received the paperwork. No online access to the form. I’m still transitioning between two states but still no form. I go into the Lamar location and wait over an hour just to fill out a form and provide 2 firms of ID! Can we come in to this century. I’ve never experienced this level of difficulty for utilities in my life.

My advice, if you don’t get anywhere with the person you called first, just hang up and call again to get someone different. My study suggests ¼ customer service agents do their jobs.
…So I faxed the authority in a month ago, because they told me once that was sent it would be turned on.
I called to check on the status of the order and the residential service agent who answered sounded high, didn’t hear me out and transferred me to business services even though I started by explaining it is a residential address. Of course that’s not where I belonged, after a long hold and some more explanation the transfer back to residential agents disconnected me. I jumped through their unorganized phone system again, got to an agent who also sounded very sleepy, but much more friendly than the first. He was able to start services the next day with $ 175 deposit, $ 45 connection fee billed.

Easily the worst utility I’ve ever had the displeasure of being forced to buy services from, topping even Etisalat in the UAE.
Most utility companies are moving everything online these days because it’s so much easier for everyone. Not so with MLGW. There are online options, but none of them seem to actually work and some things MLGW just has to do via paper. When I tried to fill out a new account activation request, I kept getting error messages for no explicable reason, so I decided to try to track down a real live person on the phone.
That didn’t work out too well. I was hung up on in the middle of giving out information for no reason and then had to call back and start things all over. Apparently there was a problem with my apartment and they had to make a lot of phone calls to resolve it, so I had to call back yet again later and verbally fill out the oddly extensive form all over again before I could finally get approved for service. Never had to do anything like this before with any other service; most utilities are fairly laid back.
And what great service it is! The power costs are absurdly overpriced and I already don’t trust their meter at all. They tack on a tacky «activation fee» along with other assorted random fees and start threatening to shut down your service immediately if you don’t send them some contract and bunches of IDs in paper form (again, what happened to doing things online?). I never received such a contract and apparently I have to return this specific, personalized contract rather than filling out a blank form one. I can’t wait for tomorrow so I can start another round of phone tag to get this latest mess resolved.
This is the beginning of a beautiful relationship, I can just tell.