Adam Rothschild wrote:
If Ameritech cuts some copper, disrupting someone's 56k DDS service into the CMH-IX, would you hold every single employee of theirs at gunpoint?
Nah. There are plenty of other reasons to do that. </HUMOR> for the sarcasm impaired. I will, however, say that I have been in contact with some -- not many, but some -- Ameritech employees who are well-clued. Some of 'em work in Team Data, some of 'em work in Hi-Cap. They are out there, and I'm sure they exist at Bellsouth and the other RBOBs[0]. That said, I can point to plenty of horror stories about Ameritech. My favorite was when suddenly we[1] started nasty calls from customers thinking we'd closed up and left town - people dialed into us and got a message that the lines had been disconnected. That was Saturday morning, and I spent much of the afternoon telilng Ameritech "get up off of your asses and do something; don't tell me there will be a 24-hour turnaround... we're an ISP, and you've cut off one of our main sources of revenue. No, I don't care what you have to do, if you can't personally get repair out there, you go talk to someone who can." Nothing fancy here, folks. It was, at the time, 30 POTS lines in a hunt group. (This was before 56K came into being and everyone started going to PRIs)
Don't want to be associated with that stereotype? Get rid of 99% of your organization or go to work for someone else.
That's just stooping low.
Although it probably shouldn't have been said here, my bet is that a lot of people have felt that way once in a while. It's like being a cop (and I have friends who are police officers, and they'll tell you this too). They do lots of useful, necessary work, but you ask them how many people thank them for the good things they do on a daily basis, and the answer *will* be very close to zero - and one slip-up, and whatever good you might have done will be forgotten quickly. With RBOBs, it's not necessarily the individual employees we should point our ire at, but the organizations as a whole. Individual employees tend to be very convenient targets for venting, but quite often they are not *appropriate* targets. Cheers, and happy GNU Year, SJS. [0] Regional Bell Operating BORG [1] "we" - myself and the ISP I used to work for. -- Steve Sobol, BOFH, President 888.480.4NET 866.DSL.EXPRESS 216.619.2NET North Shore Technologies Corporation http://NorthShoreTechnologies.net JustTheNet/JustTheNet EXPRESS DSL (ISP Services) http://JustThe.net mailto:sjsobol@NorthShoreTechnologies.net Proud resident of Cleveland, Ohio