I’m not going to name the telco that I’m currently waging war with, but I can’t imagine it’ll be all that difficult to guess. Firstly, I’ve mentioned before that I live in New York. Secondly, I’m a DSL customer. That basically narrows it down to a handful and, well, the company in question is one of the big players nationally.
Tuesday of this week, I woke up to find that my internet was out. Initially, I thought nothing of it. My DSL service is more or less like a half-tame pet, something you play around with when it decides to come by. Later, when it unexpectedly leaves you just sort of wonder where it’s gotten to. This time though the usual signs of an intermittent outage were missing – instead of resetting when I power cycled the modem I got a flashing DSL line alert. That was unusual.
Sure enough, I came back twelve hours later and nothing had changed. I was still reluctant to call but I figured I might as well since this had been going on rather longer than normal and, well, I’d rather like to use this service I drop $30/month on.
My first call to my good friends at the DSL service went…let’s say I spent two hours listening to a recycled robot voice tell me to power cycle my model. Sure, I’ve done that. In fact, I cycled before I even got to your shitty phone system. How did I know to do that? – because I’ve had to do that every day since I got the damn thing and because that’s the only troubleshooting service they have for DSL modems. There are literally no other troubleshooting steps whatsoever if your modem does not work beyond a power cycle. Quite surreal really…
I finally got a hold of a person…who proceeded to walk me through power cycling the modem. Once we got through that nonsense, they realized that a technician would be necessary which they kindly scheduled for the next day.
Fair enough. I took a day off from work in order to meet the technician. 1pm. 2pm. 3pm. 4pm. At 4pm I called and they confirmed that my ticket was still open and someone was coming. 5pm – the end of the allotted time. I called again. An hour and a half later they told me they would have to schedule.
Awesome. God-damn awesome. I’m sure glad I took a day off from work.
Just then the technician arrives – two hours late and well beyond business hours – to look at my DSL. I admit, I was absolutely ecstatic. Here, I thought, is some kind of service. Sure, it took my calling for, at this point, a total of about four hours on this problem, and sure the technician is well outside of the appointment period, but hey, next day service.
The technician looked, poked, jabbed, and prodded. Final conclusion –75 feet of phone lines lying in the street. The lines were ripped off the building probably in a recent storm.
So, what does that mean?
We’ll need to get a team to redo these lines.
When will that happen?
Tomorrow.
Great.
The technician left and I went to bed assuming that everything was in good hands.
Fast forward a day. I get home from work rather thinking my internet might be fixed. Turns out, it isn’t. Not at all. No one came out. The cables are still lying in the road.
First I call DSL repair. This takes about an hour. On the other end they tell me that there’s an open appointment to visit me but no associated ticket so they aren’t sure whether anyone is coming. Really?
The problem, again, is the seventy-five feet of cables laying in the street. For my next attempt, I thought I might call the cables in as a safety issue, like a good citizen, and see where that might get me. Turns out, not far. After another hour on hold I talked with a Sandy from sales who couldn’t seem to get a hold of anyone who I could report the down lines to. She suggested I call back some other time.
Again, really? Apparently, cables in the road is not of sufficient concern to even take the information down.
That’s more or less, where I’m at now. Is someone showing up? Is anyone going to clean up the cables in the road? Will I have to spend another three hours on the phone checking? No idea. I called this morning to try to confirm – nothing. I called to report the down cables again – all I got was a brusque, thank you for calling, we’ll look into it.
On my end, I’ve got an appointment with Time Warner Cable. It is two weeks away, scheduled as inconveniently as possible, for the July 4th weekend, the only time when I’ll be available to meet them. If my good friends at the DSL company can get my shit fixed before then, then I’ll cancel the appointment and actually enjoy my holiday weekend. Otherwise I’ll lose my holiday but at least I’ll be through with DSL.
At this point, I’m not even disappointed at not having internet. I’ve sort of gotten used to it and it’s admittedly not been all that long. What I’ve through with is a wretched phone service, some bewilderingly incompetent answers, and an absurdly simple problem that no one seems to be able to definitively fix. Having survived, so far, the cruel and incomprehensible vicissitudes of the telco bureaucracy, I can only imagine with glee how Dante might have arranged his Inferno in the modern era. It’s just too bad he can’t write them into hell for real.
/rant
