That was how Bill Crabtree, the town’s communications and public affairs director, described the confused series of telephone calls people all over northern Wake County received from the Town of Wake Forest over the weekend.
Shortly after 5 p.m. Friday night, telephones began ringing. When people answered, they heard a pre-recorded message from the town informing them that their electric power bill had not been paid and unless they paid by close of business Tuesday, Nov. 18, their electric service would be disconnected on Wednesday, Nov. 19.
People who are electric customers of Duke Progress Energy and Wake Electric Membership Corporation were confused.
The town’s residential electric customers – over 5,000 of them – wondered: Did I really pay that bill? They scurried to their checkbooks or to their computers to check whether a payment was listed in their online account. Of course they had paid.
Only a few people – 292 who had not paid their bills – sighed and resolved to pay or speak to the town’s payment office early next week.
A lot of people also called the town hall main number – 919-435-9400 – to ask about the call or complain. Others called the police department while others went to the town’s website or its Facebook page to register their inquiry or complaint.
The barrage was pretty overwhelming, and within a couple hours Crabtree was responding with a new message – this one sent again to everyone listed in the local telephone directory’s white pages.
He explained that it was not an official message from the town but a “spoofing” scam done by someone who had managed to get inside the town’s telephone database. The message said the town would thoroughly investigate the call.
“We thought somebody had hacked in,” Crabtree said Monday evening. “Unfortunately, it was human error.”
The message had been recorded Friday morning by a town employee using Nixle, the town-to-resident telephone notification system, and was intended for just those 292 customers.
However, instead of checking the list for those customers, the employee incorrectly checked the list for the town’s entire telephone database.
There was quiet Saturday, but Sunday after the investigation showed it had been human error, Crabtree recorded another message for all the affected people. It explained about the human error and how the town planned to correct it with more training. They will also record the messages about overdue power bills only Monday through Thursday and will schedule them for delivery between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.
Crabtree’s Sunday message was scheduled on Nixle to be sent out at 4:30 p.m. Sunday.
But then some people received them at 1:30 a.m. Monday.
Whoops!
“The call was trying to reassure people,” Crabtree said, then said of the 1:30 a.m. timing, “How inappropriate and how wrong.”
He and other town staff are now working with Nixle to assure it does not happen again.
Tuesday he shared the message from Nixle explaining what happened.
“Thank you for your patience. Our engineering team spent the day diagnosing the issue and there were interruptions in the voice dialing over the weekend. This caused the voice call to stop and start processing several times, including in the middle of the night. The result is that numbers were retried with extremely long intervals between the attempts. We realize this is inexcusable and caused a great deal of frustration among your residents. We are extremely sorry for the situation this put you in and our team is resolving this issue.”
One Response
We have businesses in several surrounding cities. Wake Forest power is 1.5x higher than Duke power. My question is why and how can they justify these rates? Wake Forest says they support small business but this is a huge disparity and can not be justified. Wake Forest would be better served by Duke and have lower rates. The local bureaucracy is the only benefactor of the current arrangement.
In the past we have also had power surges that caused expensive damage to equipment – the city has refused to take responsibility for these problems.