My father, had been paying his waer bill using the automatic draft system for over three years without any problems. Sometime around October, the Birmingham Water Works decided to change the company they use for payments. They made the changes, and did not inform my father that the changes had taken place. The automatic payments were stopped by the Birmingham Water Works when they changed companies. They began to send bills with past due notices but my father thought that they were regular bills, he thought he was still paying automatically from his checking account.
On Friday, January 13 they cut off his water.By the time he noticed. The water department had already closed. I paid his bill through their new system early saturday but it did not matter. The water continued cut off untill Tueaday, because Monday was Martin Luther King day and the water department did not work. I called the emergency line and I was promptly told that I had to wait until Tuesday to get my water restored.
It took me three different calls to the water department to finally get them to tell me that "sometime before Midnight they would restart his water back up." When I requested reasons for them not notifiying my dad of the changes in billing, they said that they had send notices with the bills and that they had tried to call him. When I said that he did not received them because he would have immediately done something about it, they said that that was not their problem.
They offered to take off the reconection fees since this was his "first time" but told me that in the future I better just read all their invoices and junk mail to insure that they are not sending cut off notices.
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