I'm reserving judgment on the Meridian Energy disconnection fiasco until I can locate some facts.
I have noticed that the electricity companies involved (Mighty River Power owns Meridian) have spectacularly messed up the PR job on this. Okay, so it is a massive PR challenge. Hard to salvage anything from a situation where you cause someone's to die because of a bill of less than $200.
But giving the grieving family a cheque for $10,000 compounds the problem, and then saying you will no longer disconnect your customers (even presumably the noisy students who are spending all their money on booze) is just daft.
My reading is they either needed to:
a) argue that the facts were unclear and drop the issue into an investigation, or
b) mea culpa like mad and promise significant changes to policy (and possible sanctions against the contractor who did the disconnect).
Instead they are wandering erratically between a and b, and looking totally clueless. Which is sad really, as I get the impression from the interviews with the two CEOs that they are genuine people who are really upset that their companies have been involved in such a tragedy. I don't think anyone much believes that though.
Posted by carla at June 2, 2007 08:26 PM