Everything has gone as smoothly as possible in our moving preparation, which I have taken as a sign that this is all meant to happen. The only hiccup so far is that I forgot to reinstate the utilities in our name for our Texas house. The tenants moved out last week so it was pretty important to have water and electricity in place in the coming month for the yard and pool.
I thought setting up the electricity would be relatively simple, as I planned to use the same company we had before we left. My website login still worked and showed my account as "inactive." All I had to do was figure out how to activate it again.
That "simple" process ended up taking me 2 hours one evening while I was staying overnight in Bintan. I didn't know how many business days it would take for the change to take effect and we were already losing one day due to Memorial Day. So, I felt a pressing need to get it done. The combination of attempting to make that happen on my iPad using hotel wifi in Indonesia didn't exactly help. For some reason the website could not find my service address, which seemed bizarre since I was a customer in the past. After doing a web chat with a customer service rep, we discovered that I needed to input an extra "00" at the front of my street address. I was so happy to finish the process that I didn't even dwell on how stupid a system had to be to require extra zeros at the beginning of my house number.
The water utility proved to be even more interesting and global unfriendly. I stayed up late one night during the week to inquire about changing the water bill back into our names and after the woman mentioned words like, "in person," " notarized form"....I interrupted her and told her the situation. She kindly looked through their records and confirmed that they still had a signature on file for Mr. Dean and that would suffice until we could visit them in person at the end of June. Whew!
That left the natural gas. I called them the same evening as the water office and spoke with a lovely woman in their call center in Amarillo. She had a thick Texas accent, which I enjoyed listening to after being away for a year. She found it quite exciting that we were currently living so far from Texas and when we concluded our business, she asked, "When you travel from Singapore to Texas, can you fly the entire way?" (I'm thinking that she is asking if it's a direct flight)..."Or do you have to take a ship part of the way?" It was all I could do to not laugh into the phone at the question. While I wanted to answer, "Yes, I am packing my steamer trunk to prepare for the voyage over the Pacific," I simply explained that there's a 16-hour flight that connects Singapore to LA. Thank you, Natural Gas Lady, for providing some comic relief late at night here!
As best as I can tell, all the utilities should be switched and running. What struck me during the process was that whoever I spoke with in the US to make it happen (even on the web chat), they were friendly, helpful, and bent the rules when needed to find a solution. It made me look forward to life back in Texas. Because I know these conversations would have progressed very differently if I had been dealing with someone over here.
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