For once, I wish someone in the press would pick up how much the telco's suck, and try to hide significant events like this; especially this north jersey one where they said only three counties were affected! Bah! The entire LATA was affected!
At Bell Atlantic, bald-face lying to customers is SOP...they know they can get away with it and you'll send your money anyhow. Although relatively minor, I just got off the phone with BA about an ISDN line that's been out for several days here (fortunately we have a backup but it's annoying how every day they say they're going to fix it and every day someone has to call to find out what's up, etc.) Anyhow, they were able to reproduce the problem within the CO so it can't be anything here. There's been no fingerpointing. So today the BA person on the ticket tries to reassure me by saying how THEY TOLD HIM TO JUST TELL US IT'S OUR EQUIPMENT AND CLOSE THIS TICKET! Basically just tell us to get stuffed, but he refused (wotta guy.) Not shocking he calls back today to tell us he's now off that ticket so we shouldn't call him any more... Ya know, sometimes we'll say stuff like this to each other and people look at us like we're just paranoid. But here's this BA employee telling me to my face that his manager is telling him to just tell us it's our equipment problem, when they determined days ago it wasn't, and close the damned ticket. Sure, a small thing, just a little ISDN line, but what a great culture we have with Bell Atlantic. Just say whatever bullshit and leave the customer down, and no doubt deny it all later. So long as we have these omnipotent RBOCs whose paychecks are basically the same whether they're delivering service or not in a phrase: We're Fukt. -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@world.std.com | http://www.world.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD The World | Public Access Internet | Since 1989 *oo*