Last fall TDS came through our neighborhood installing fiber optic lines. We got a mailer informing us that they would need to be doing work in our yard and essentially saying to contact them if we had concerns. The mailer also gave instructions on how to reach them if they did any damage while working in our yard. Keep in mind that we are not even using their service - they just needed to go through our yard in order to lay their main lines.

A week after their crew came through, we got our sprinkler system blown out, and lo and behold, their was a large break in one of our Sprinkler pipes. (This was the first week on November). My wife contacted TDS, and they responded and said that they would send a crew out to fix it this spring - since the water was turned off, they would have no way of knowing if their repairs had worked or not. This seemed entirely reasonable.

Well yesterday their crew came out while I was at work. My wife called me and said that there was a group of six guys who showed up at the house un-announced. None of them spoke solid English, and they couldn't figure out how to turn on our sprinklers to see where the leak was. I was able to walk my wife through it over the phone. After she ran them for two minutes they were able to communicate to her that "the problem no could be TDS fault", and left. I asked her why they said it couldn't be their fault and she said they just pointed repeatedly at the break in the pipe and either spoke in Spanish or said "no TDS" and shook their heads. She reached out to the help number that we originally contacted with our problem but they aren't answering calls or returning messages.

I mean, I guess it's entirely possible that my sprinkler system had been working perfectly fine all last summer, TDS came out a week after the water was shut off and dug around in my yard, and then a week later there was a break in the pipe right around where they had been working, but it seems like an awful coincidence. A friend in the neighborhood who is a plumber told me I can probably fix the problem for around a $100-200 bucks, so it's not the end of the world, its just really annoying that we let TDS work in our yard when we weren't even their customer and this is how they treat us. I'm thinking I'll just post the story on Twitter and tag their social media account and see where that gets us.