Their communication has been horrible

Aside from the obvious frustration of it being so many outages, one of my biggest sources of anger has been the terrible communication around it and that's something I hope they learn/grow from in this. The day they did a planned multi day outage, we didn't know about it until an hour or two before they did it (for real) with no idea how long they were keeping it off. And we didn't even see their memo until the power was already off. That day it got turned off, our dog was in the house and we were not, we had to get really creative on how to get the garage door open as our house door is really tough to open. Had I known a day or two in advance I would have been prepared for it- by not being out of the house so I could be inside and leave our doors unlocked to go in and out. Which also the fact that we have to reschedule our lives for their outages is a source of huge frustration in and of itself! Had we known ahead of time, we also wouldn't have bought groceries that would just spoil. It was frigid outside and this outage lasted DAYS. I'd never felt more uncared for by a service provider, and that wasn't even for a real outage issue, but to help with fire risk--however the neighborhood literally across from us had their power on the whole time, which also felt so frustrating--it would have been nice if they'd have rotated who lost power, if they were truly trying to ease fire danger. It also happens so often you start to think, "obviously there's something wrong with the equipment or the lines" because it's not happening anywhere else around us. If they had communicated to us the issues and how they were working to fix it, it would have made this all a lot better, but every outage (planned or unplanned) without any solid communication around it just made it so much worse. You wonder and have to think they aren't sharing because they don't want to have to fix it (or pay for the fixes). I hate that, due to the nature of the grid, we are stuck with them as our provider. it's truly been eye opening to me how badly not having a competitor is for this service provider. They can do whatever they want for quite a while, when they have no consequence of losing customers to better providers. And I'd say it's not just their lack of communication, but also the inaccurate communication they have, here is an example of the terrible communications: The most recent planned outage was supposed to be 12 AM- 8 AM (that's what they told us) and our power got shut off at 2 AM middle of when we are sleeping, so we all woke up right in the middle of the night and then it stayed off until 9:30 AM--they chose to do this on a weekday, where we are trying to get ready for work and have a baby that needs bottles heated. So their communication hasn't been accurate even when they do communicate, and the timing they chose really sucks. For this recent one in particular, it would have been better or them to turn it off a 9 or 10 at night before all are deep sleeping and have it back up before everyone's trying to get ready and needs to use their kitchen and bathroom. I don't know why that wasn't a thought they had, but because it wasn't, it makes me feel like they really don't care about how it's impacting us at all.