Welcome to the dystopian world of dealing with French bureaucracy. On Thursday August 17th I was on the phone the whole morning with EDF trying to sort out my house’s electrical connection problems. Initially I got Jerome in Poitiers. Jerome is not someone who likes challenges or dealing with anything out of the normal run of things that will disturb his easy routine. Jerome is both incompetent and lazy.<\/p>\n
As such he’s a typical EDF customer service employee who will go far in an organisation where the most simple tasks are either impossible, done incorrectly or not done at all, mistakes are the order of the day and nobody is ever held accountable because there’s no way of making contact with the organisation except through them. It’s a carefully thought-through setup.<\/p>\n
As I mentioned in previous posts, having had a temporary connection via EDF for over two years, I now merely need to convert that to a permanent one. You’d think that would be the simplest thing in the world to do, but no, in France it’s not. If it was done just with the click of a mouse button asking for an engineer to attend and switch the connection over (10 minutes) and making the necessary changes to the charging tariff, half the people in EDF and Enedis, it’s sister company and partner in crime, would be put out of work and the French state could never tolerate that.<\/p>\n
So a completely new project and ‘dossier’ has to be created with all that that entails including the massive potential for cock-ups, which are inevitable. First there was the inevitable confusion over my address. When the temporary connection was set up there was no house number because there was no house so it was described as ‘the place know as…’. <\/p>\n
Now I’d have thought that EDF would have been pretty used to that – it must be so for every new-build house that they connect – but the concept was a difficult one for EDF client services to grasp and it was challenging for them to set up a NEW account (yes, a new dossier means a new account even though the client ie me, and the supply address are the same as for the existing connection) with a minor change in the address details.<\/p>\n
Just for information, although I’ve only had my old address at Plazac and my new address at Fleurac, I was told that at the time of my conversation with Jerome there were 4 ‘dossiers’ in my name – only God and EDF know why – and unbeknown to me, things were going to get worse.<\/p>\n
So by now we were about 20 minutes in and we’d managed to resolve the address issue but that still left what for some reason has turned out to be the huge stumbling block of what’s called the PDL or ‘Point de Livraison’. Nobody has bothered to explain but I’ve found out myself that this is a unique code that’s applied to the meter that records the usage of electricity at the location, so quite simple really.<\/p>\n
The meter in my temporary connection box has a PDL and it’s shown on every bill that I receive. Before they could go ahead and instruct Enedis to make the connection to my new house they needed to know the new PDL. Naturally I had no clue what they they were talking about, just as a lay French person wouldn’t either, and nobody was either willing, or more likely able, to tell me where to find it.<\/p>\n
Way back on 1st August I had a telephone ‘rendez-vous’ with an ‘engineer’ from Enedis in order to progress my connection. He helpfully told me that I was already connected and that was it, before rudely ending the conversation without making any effort to deal with the issues that clearly existed. He was evidently another lazy, incompetent person who didn’t give a damn about the customers of the organisation for which he worked.<\/p>\n
Almost two weeks prior to my conversation with EDF’s Jerome I’d also had a conversation with another EDF customer service agent who’d set me up with a new ‘permanent’ account. I’d then received an email from yet another EDF tosser called ‘Mallory’ who assured me of their fullest attention in getting my connection done but then proved incapable, apparently, of replying to emails.<\/p>\n
Both of these parties were, however, useless and merely compounded the problems. When we’d hit the PDL stumbling block it appears that they’d used, or made up, a PDL to create the ‘new’ permananent contract. Sadly, the system, as it is, doesn’t work like that which I know but apparently they do not. When I emailed a helpful contact that I’d made in Enedis she told me that the PDL being used by EDF was for another temporary connection which, of course, is the last thing that I need and that only the real PDL would be acceptable to progress the connection.<\/p>\n
At this point I decided to do my own research and it didn’t take long to establish that although it’s not live, the PDL can be obtained in seconds from the new Linky smart meter that’s installed in my house. Apparently the EDF buffoons either aren’t aware of this or can’t be bothered to share such information with you as with it the situation could have been well on the way to being resolved weeks ago.<\/p>\n
I checked the Linky PDL with Enedis and my contact confirmed that it was correct, referred to an existing Enedis connection project which was ready to go with all fees paid and could be connected on the same day. I passed this information on to ‘Mallory’ in EDF by email but it apparently was totally ignored.<\/p>\n
I found this out when I was in contact with Jerome who listened while I explained the whole saga for the umpteenth time, assured me that he understood what the problem was and after sorting out the address issue, said that he’d fix it. He said that all he’d need to do was update the PDL on my new contract and that the line would go quiet while he did so.<\/p>\n
It did do alright, because after about five minutes the line went dead. This has happened to me so many times I now know what it means. Jerome found that he’d have to do some work for a change so just put the phone down.<\/p>\n
I didn’t call back immediately but left it for a few minutes before redialling the EDF customer service number. I said that I’d been talking to Jerome but the young lady on the other end of the line said she didn’t know who that was and that she’d deal with my problem. And this young lady was like a shining star compared to her colleagues.<\/p>\n
The first thing we established was that Jerome had done absolutely nothing, so she made the necessary amendments to my contract address and then went on to deal with the PDL problem. It didn’t take her long to find that the system wouldn’t allow her to do so (what happens if your meter breaks down?) and the quickest way to deal with it was to create yet another new contract for me. <\/p>\n
There was an interesting result from doing this. The temporary connection I’ve had for 2 years is of 12kVA power (12 kilowatts) and when the contract for my new permanent connection was originally set up it was found that 9kVA would be sufficient making it a bit cheaper. This young lady went through the whole questionnaire yet again and said that 6kVA should do it, making it cheaper still and that if later this was found to be too low, it could be increased. See what I mean compared to Jerome?<\/p>\n
She then said that she’d contact Enedis while I waited in order to expedite the connection and after several minutes she came back with the bad news that put the cherry on the top of the cake of this whole farce.<\/p>\n
When she’d cross-checked the address of the connection with Enedis she found that there was a discrepancy that she came back to me to ask about. It turns out that yes, there is a live Enedis project with the correct PDL but not at my address. Despite having connected up my ‘branchement provisoire’ it’s shown as being at the address of a neighbour down the road who has been connected for many years and is definitely in no need of another.<\/p>\n
Oh no, you think, just another cock-up. Yes it is, but this one has ramifications. It means that an Enedis engineer will have to come on site to make an ‘inspection’ and the earliest that one can do this is 31st August – another two weeks away. Then Enedis will have to arrange for the connection to be made and I’ll be surprised if this happens before the end of September.<\/p>\n
And this is after I applied for it to be done on 11th July. This can’t be normal surely, you ask. Yes, a similar thing happened when I ordered my current temporary connection and also when I ordered my water connection from Veolia. So it is normal – and my French friends also agree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Welcome to the dystopian world of dealing with French bureaucracy. On Thursday August 17th I was on the phone the whole morning with EDF trying to sort out my house’s electrical connection problems. Initially I got Jerome in Poitiers. Jerome is not someone who likes challenges or dealing with anything out of the normal run … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21894"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21899,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21894\/revisions\/21899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}