Well, Wonker and Mrs. Wonker collectively ended up missing yet another day of work yesterday, due to what eventually turned out to be institutional Verizon idiocy. Fortunately, the story ultimately had a surprise happy ending around dinnertime yesterday. Although we're not going to declare victory quite yet.
Promise on Monday night, after Verizon had stiffed Wonker by making him wait all day for a repair guy who never showed: he'll be there for sure on Tuesday sometime between 8 AM and 12 noon. Okay. Mrs. W agreed to stand watch. Sadly, Wonk had to get in the car and return from work around noon. No repair dude.
Made another call to the tech support supervisor around 2 PM and politely but firmly promised to pull the service contract if the problem weren't resolved that business day. Associate supervisor promised to try to get in touch with local tech to see what could be done, and promised to call back 1/2 hour later since, as he put it, "I could be on hold with them for up to 20 minutes." I totally believed the veracity of that statement.
Well, 20 minutes stretched into half an hour, which stretched into 45 minutes. Still no call. But then a surprise. An actual field tech called me from a location about 10 miles away, told me he was wrapping up a job, and would be over in about 1/2 an hour. It was more like 45 minutes, but what they hey.
Dude shows up, we go out back, and he tells me he's going to test the line for awhile. This he does. At which point he wraps up his equipment, walks up the hill (we have a 3 story townhouse with walkout basement), gets in his truck without telling me anything, and splits. Hmm, I think.
About half an hour later, he returns once again and shows up in the backyard testing the outlet again. Now he knocks to come in. We head upstairs where the room is torn apart to expose the outlet behind some heavy office furniture I foolishly bought. Checks the line there. Tech dude breathes a sigh of relief. Problem is not in my house's telephone wiring, which would've meant he had to re-wire the house. Seems that a card out there in a substation box about 1/2 a mile away is not synching to my house, although my exterior outlet and the DSL modem are synching. This, then, is where the tech dude had been disappearing to.
At which point, he disappeared again, promising to call me or leave me a note if and when he'd solved the issue at the Mother Box. Said I didn't need to be home anymore since the problem obviously had nothing to do with my wiring or equipment.
Randomly checking my machine and modem about another half hour later, I noticed that the DSL light was finally in steady-state, indicating, according to the limited material Verizon provided me, that the DSL connection was good. I booted up Safari on the G-4 dual processor Mac (haven't entered the Intel Mac world yet, sorry Steve), and voilà! Connectivity!! And pretty good speed, importunings of Comcast's Slowskis notwithstanding.
Tech dude called about 10 minutes later to inform me of what became obvious, and I assume that put this trouble ticket to bed.
The lesson here: for all the money they charge us and all the hassle we go through to get service, broadband providers like Verizon might want to adopt a simple system that nearly every vendor in the real world has adopted, assuming it wants to keep your business: CALL YOUR CUSTOMER WITH AN UPDATE FROM THE FIELD. This takes only a minute or two, and would allow people like me to get back to work if a tech isn't going to show on a given day as happened to moi on Monday. It became clear to me, given the time and travel it took my tech to pin down the physical problem, which had nothing to do with me, that some of these connectivity problems are not trivial and can take a good while to solve.
My guess is that the office out of which the local techs operate (wherever it is, Verizon is keeping it a dark secret so customers can't contact it) know damn well at some point if they're running behind and are not going to make a promised deadline. I'd assume that the local office knew that my "Monday 8-1" appointment was hosed by around lunchtime, as the assigned tech was probably stuck on an intractable problem that was eating clock. Would it have killed them to call me and reschedule? I could've gotten back to work to get cracking on my own backlog.
Instead, no one called me at all, and the tech support supervisor I contacted later Monday evening demanded, in a surly voice, to know where I'd gotten this special number. Clearly, the human beings staffing telephonic tech support have no clue from the field support people what's going on, which severely limits their opportunity to provide folks like me with updates. Hey, people, this is VERIZON. DOESN'T ANYBODY OUT THERE IN THE FIELD HAVE A CELL PHONE?????
In the end, the telephonic tech support people were almost embarrassingly nice, except for the evening moron. The local tech, once he showed up, was a bit taciturn but again quite polite, and ultimately successful. For probably not much more effort, would it be too much to put these guys in touch, at least on the supervisory level, to keep a local customer informed to eliminate customer downtime and lost work hours? No. It's just that the bureaucrats in huge companies like Verizon are far more concerned with adding a few pennies to the bottom line by trimming niceties off customer service. And they are probably supported by the math, i.e., most people will put up with the torture rather than can the service.
But it's no way to run customer support. Clearly, Verizon already has good, competent techs and support staff working for them, either directly or on contract. (It's almost certain my first tech phone call was routed to India.) Why make these people look bad or have to endure pissed off customers if just a little call from the field or the local office in real time would clear things up if appointments are running behind?
Okay, this long post is more or less a running diatribe, if you combine it with the previous post, and in some sense, has nothing to do with a blog generally dedicated to the politics of language and culture. But on the other hand, it does. The net experience is increasingly becoming THE way our culture is communicating and morphing. One wonders if part of the insane craziness of the leftwing netroots, and, frankly, some of the vocal wackos on the right as well, aren't in some way aided and abetted by the asinine hoop jumping both sides are forced to do to keep their communications systems running?
Most commuters in urban areas are already frazzled by two frustrating commutes per day. Endless hours are lost, not to mention gallons of fuel, whose profits seem largely going to fund Al Qaeda or Hugo Chavez these days. If you add to this volatile mix endless troubles, billing problems, and hours on hold with telcos, broadband providers, cable providers, etc., not to mention the extortion notes that show up every month disguised as bills, is it any wonder that more and more people are going completely off their rockers?
2 comments:
The New York Tel Co virus: You may not know this but Verizon began life as New York Telephone, the worst division of the original Ma Bell. When New York Telephone became a Baby Bell, NYNEX, it had the worst service in the United States. When it merged with New England Telephone, service in Boston immediately went to hell. When it merged with Southeastern Bell, service along the entire coast went sour. Then it became Verizon. This is a true story.
Nozirev Mitciv
Dear Anonymous,
Right you are. Every time a merger happened, it seemed that it was the corrosive spirit of Nynex that survived every time.
Our original Ma Bell entry down here in the DC area was known as Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, C&P for short. Like all the old Ma Bells, it cost too much for long distance, but service was never down.
Then after the breakup, C&P magically morphed into Bell Atlantic and moved its HQ to Philly at which point service deteriorated noticeably. And, like all the new Baby Bells, now if something crapped out, you got to pay a lot to have a repairman come out, whereas before, Ma Bell took care of her kids "for free."
Then, of course, Bell Atlantic supposedly devoured Nynex to become, eventually, Verizon. I say supposedly because you are right, the new entity seems to have acquired all the bad traits of Nynex while shedding its own few remaining good traits.
The whole reason for the breakup (which I had to guide AT&T stockholding clients thru years ago when I was a stockbroker--what a mess) was to encourage "competition" and "new technologies." Well, with all the mergers these days, I'm seeing a hell of a lot less competition and few, if any, "new technologies," unless you count incremental improvements to technologies invented essentially 10-12 years ago. Oh, yeah, and a lot less human beings to talk to when problems crop up.
I'm basically an anti-monopolist, but roughly 20 years after the Bell breakup, I'm beginning to wonder, looking at my phone and cable bills, if we might not have been better off keeping Ma Bell around.
--W
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