13 January 2007
Fire Your Phone Company
Friend Bryan T. is having problems with the phone company.
I don't remember when it all happened -- maybe when they broke up Ma Bell into the Baby Bells -- but at some point, the phone companies gave up all the interior wiring to the home/business owner. Way back in the 70s or so. So, yeah, this has been law or court order or consent decree or policy or whatever for quite some time, and it's not just Your Favorite Telephone Company, the one soon to be know as... AT&T. And, yes, unless Granny buys a service contract for interior phone wiring from YFTC, or its equivalent in other locales, then she's gotta go out to the NETWORK INTERFACE and plug her phone in so she can claim that it's their problem and not hers.
When we had BellSouth DSL on the beachside in Daytona Beach, we had recurring problems. Interacting with their service and troubleshooting personnel was a real pain. Mack finally got some super special troubleshooting vice-president designee who finally got our service fixed and running at, well, about half the advertised speed. By then, we had gone back to Time Warner / Bright House and were doing our network connectivity over the cable. (Current service by Comcast, which has not been nearly as bad as I thought it would be based on complaint level visible on the net.)
We also started doing phonage over the net. Our service provider there is Voice Pulse, not a biggee in that department, but adequate for our purposes. After we got the net-phone stuff working, we fired Bell South completely. I've never regretted that once.
Bellsouth claims it is on my end (but of course!), and left me a rambling, [...] sort of message, outlining a procedure that I should follow by going outside, opening the box on the house exterior, connecting a telephone to something, testing it, and if I still hear the problem, then I should call them.
People, I am in complete disbelief over this kind of garbage. Is someone like an eighty-year-old grandmother supposed to follow through with this kind of shit? Why in the name of all that's reasonable should ANYONE be fed this kind of complete, utterly insulting bullshit?
I HATE BELLSOUTH, PROBABLY MORE THAN I HATE ANY OTHER CORPORATE ENTITY (except Wal-Mart). It's likely the fault of the half-wit tech that installed the second line, on a Friday afternoon, wanting to get the hell home for the weekend.
I don't remember when it all happened -- maybe when they broke up Ma Bell into the Baby Bells -- but at some point, the phone companies gave up all the interior wiring to the home/business owner. Way back in the 70s or so. So, yeah, this has been law or court order or consent decree or policy or whatever for quite some time, and it's not just Your Favorite Telephone Company, the one soon to be know as... AT&T. And, yes, unless Granny buys a service contract for interior phone wiring from YFTC, or its equivalent in other locales, then she's gotta go out to the NETWORK INTERFACE and plug her phone in so she can claim that it's their problem and not hers.
When we had BellSouth DSL on the beachside in Daytona Beach, we had recurring problems. Interacting with their service and troubleshooting personnel was a real pain. Mack finally got some super special troubleshooting vice-president designee who finally got our service fixed and running at, well, about half the advertised speed. By then, we had gone back to Time Warner / Bright House and were doing our network connectivity over the cable. (Current service by Comcast, which has not been nearly as bad as I thought it would be based on complaint level visible on the net.)
We also started doing phonage over the net. Our service provider there is Voice Pulse, not a biggee in that department, but adequate for our purposes. After we got the net-phone stuff working, we fired Bell South completely. I've never regretted that once.
