Last weekend, when high winds caused massive blackouts, affecting roughly 13,000 Seattle residents, an unknown number of people who called Seattle City Light to report the blackouts were summarily hung up on by City Light's automated answering service—and customers complain that this isn't the first time***.

"You go through the menu system, it tells you about the known outages, then you get to a level where you can report it by entering in your phone number," explains Pinehurst resident Renee Staton. "When I called, it said, 'You have a non-recognized telephone number,' and then hung up on me. This is an ongoing issue. The same thing happens when there's a downed power line—we can't report it."

"They're smart enough to harness the power of electricity but can't figure out how to master a phone system so I can report blackouts at my house?" writes Queen Anne resident David M, who reportedly had his HUMP! filming thwarted by the blackouts. "Fuck those fucking guys."

City Light spokesman Scott Thomsen says that Sunday's hangups could be the result of an internal systems upgrade that affected the City Light phone systems during the windstorms. "We had two short disconnects that afternoon," he says. "That’s been resolved." Also at issue: the 12,000+ angry City Light customers who were overwhelming the system with the calls. "It became a resource issue for our dispatchers who update the hotline," Thomsen explains. "That is something we’re following up on."

But Thomsen says that the most common explanation for callers being hung up on is that they're accessing the system wrong.

***Call me crazy but I suspect that those customers are a very different breed—a more responsible breed—than the denizens who haunt slog, which might just make this the most worthless, long-winded post ever.

As Staton explained, the system requires callers to enter in the telephone number tied to their City Light before reporting a power outage or downed line. The requirement supposedly prevents pranksters from calling in and reporting outages that don’t exist, Thomsen says. But if a resident punches in the number they're calling from—say, a new cell phone number—as opposed to the number associated with their account, the system hangs up.

"We’ve been encouraging our customers for the past two years to please check with us and update their account info," Thomsen says. "If you’ve added a cell phone, we need that in the system." He adds: "You can enter at least two numbers."