My 21st century existence crashed directly with a 20th century utility today, and it wasn’t pretty.

Every one in the immediate StarterTech family awoke this morning to no running water in our homes.  We had no clue what the cause was, but due to two of us having to run into town, we just opted for someone stopping by the water district office and seeing if our bills were up to date and so on.

What we learned was that the turn off was an area wide issue in our vicinity due to upgrades to the water system.  When we inquired as to why we knew nothing about this, the utility office workers informed us, “Well, we put a notice on channel 3″, our only local television station.

Therein resides the problem.  People with DirecTV or Dish Network do not receive our local channel.  They can barely transmit over the air, and won’t even be doing that as of February 19th, and our local cable provider leaves a lot to be desired.

So here we are left with the issue that our water utility, an essential aspect of human life, left the ability to warn people of a major service outage to just the local television channel in the hopes you would see it.  The outage was from 8:00 AM to 12:30 PM, and once it was back to working, we are under a boil order for 48 hours.  What happens if someone left for work at 7 AM and reutnrs sometime after 12:30?  This person didn’t see the notice, missed the outage, and now they are drinking water they have no idea that they are supposed to be boiling their water.

In this day and age, with dwindling television ratings, this was the best way the water company could find to communicate this important notice to us?  How about doing some other free things that could potentially reach even more people?

• Email burst list
• Social network profiles
• Twitter account

Those are just three ideas off the top of my head that would cost them no money, and reach potentially even more people.  In the realm of alternatives that cost, there are also an actual website with notifications on it and text message notifications.

In short, therewas no excuse for the lack of communication, and way too much reliance on us just happening to see a notice on the local television station.  How about getting a bit more proactive and actually going to where your customers are nowadays?  I know, what a concept.