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  • One Phone Company?

    Two weeks ago I read that AT&T -- was SBC, which used to be Ameritech -- is buying Bell South. I think that after that, there will only be Verizon and AT&T and that's it.

    I know Verizon owns wireless. I think AT&T (SBC) owns most of Cingular.

    I think it sucks that the number of phone companies is shrinking, and the phone companies seem to own most of the wireless companies.

    Back the late 1990's, I can remember if you got a raw deal on a cellphone, you paid $50 per month. Then sometime later, it was $25 per month on average.

    Seems like corporations own the governments anymore, and this bothers me that the phone costs will end up getting high again and that the service will suck.

    I briefly worked at a Verizon DSL Support call center in 2004 (outsourced). We provided just about the sh*ttiest customer support imaginable and, no kidding, the goal at that place was basically to get the customer off the phone. There were patrols called "floor monitors" that would harass you if your call was more than 10 minutes. These guys typically knew jack sh*t about the job.

    One time one of them pulled up a chair next to me and asked, "How much longer will you be on the call?" I turned around and said "10 minutes plus however long I have to talk to you".

    That job sucked. We were encouraged to lie all the time, which a few of the more technically literate among us refused to do.

    Anyway, these phone companies do terrible service and I hate to see them merge back in a single company.
    Quakeone.com - Being exactly one-half good and one-half evil has advantages. When a portal opens to the antimatter universe, my opposite is just me with a goatee.

    So while you guys all have to fight your anti-matter counterparts, me and my evil twin will be drinking a beer laughing at you guys ...

  • #2
    Funny rant by a friend about bad telephone service: It's a MUST READ if you have 5 minutes to spare.
    Okay, here goes.

    Background:

    For the last ~7 years my dad has shared suite 202 with another lawyer - but they do not have any business relationship other than that. For various reasons they have decided to stop sharing a suite for their offices now that the lease has run out. My dad was able to secure a smaller office next door to the shared one, and will get to keep the #202 suite number.

    He has one fax number (5519) which also carries the business class DSL line, and a three line number (5585) for voice calls.

    The phones that he uses for the 5585 number are fairly ancient, and are tied to an equally ancient PBX system. This equipment is shared between him and the other lawyer he shares the office with. Since it is so ancient, after some research he found that it would be much much cheaper to either:

    a) buy a new PBX + phone system, and keep the same services from telus active. ($$$ expensive with little benefits)

    b) ditch telus for everything other than the 5519 number by switching to voice over ip with a PBX built by me. This is only slightly cheaper for equipment costs than 'a', but saves tons of money each year, and gives many other very nice techy benefits as well (like being able to take 'local' calls from the office anywhere that there is internet). In case of internet failure, the system would failover to the 5519 number with only one line.

    Regardless of which he decided on I was going to have to set it up. I pushed for option b since I love geeky nerdy stuff.

    Moving day was officially set for Tuesday, and due to a big case opening up, my dad ended up being away till Tuesday night.

    Part 1: Telus, please move my service from suite 202 to suite 202

    This on its own took several hours to explain to telus. First the situation had to be explained to multitudes of different people, and none of them seemed to grasp what was going on. After a few hours on hold and somewhere around 7 different agents an appointment for the "electrician" to come was set for the morning of Tuesday the 20th.

    His instructions were to move the 5519 line to the new suite. Thats it. The wiring was already done for him, all he had to do was go to the floor's phone closet untwist two wires, and connect a different two. Done.

    When he showed up it took ~30 minutes to clairify this, and another hour for him to do it. He did it properly and left at 11:30am. At ~12 I plugged the DSL modem in to ensure that the connection was still alive, and a nice green light showed up to tell me that everything was ok.

    Tuesday Dec 20: Something isn't right here

    Officially I still wasn't allowed to move in yet, since the contractors setting up the suite still needed to do some painting and such, so I unplugged the modem and went back to the old office to do other prep work. Eventually the moving started, and the DSL was at the bottom of the list of things to do, so I didn't get around to even plugging it in again till ~10pm.

    This time there was a steady RED light on the modem instead of the green one that I'd seen earlier. Now this is a big big problem. My dad needs the internet to work in order to be able to use his nice new VoIP phones I bought for him. He can fall back on the old phones, but they're hooked up to the old PBX in the old suite, so this is difficult and silly.

    So my first phone call follows, and after ~20 minutes of being on hold I'm explaining that I've got a red light. Please make my DSL work, I NEED it for the beginning of the business day.

    The conversation went something like this:
    "Okay, I have no internet"
    'How long is the phone cord to the wall jack?'
    "I don't know, but I would estimate that the cable that is connected here is probably less than 50 meters to the telephone room on this floor"
    'Thats fine, how long is the phone cord connected to the wall jack?'
    "There is no wall jack, your electrician just crimped a male connector onto the end of the cat5 cable running from the phone room on this floor. Remember, I'm not in a house, I'm at a business..."

    ... repeat several times for good measure. Eventually I just lie and tell him that it is 2 feet long, and he says thats good. We go on to power cycling the modem.

    'Okay, go to your start menu, control panel, ...' etc
    "I don't have any computers connected, all I have is the DSL modem connected to the power jack, and the 5519 phone line, and the modem isn't getting a connection from your end. It looks like it isn't getting service at all, since there is no blinking like there normally would be, it does the same thing if I unplug the phone cord altogether"

    ...repeat.

    'Okay, well what I'm going to do for you is set up a trouble ticket, and we'll have someone call you tomorrow'
    "What time tomorrow? This needs to be up and running by 7:00am in order for me to be able to do business."
    'The office opens at 9:00am...'
    "I need to talk to a manager"
    'We don't have any managers on right now'
    "What? Well I need to talk to someone with more autority than you..."
    'I'm as high as you will get.'

    ...repeat several times. I stress that it is very urgent that this gets back up and running soon, and all he does is give me a 'trouble ticket', and a 'manager ECR #' which is supposed to make a manager call me so that I can yell at them to speed things up.

    It is now ~1am and I start splicing cables, and stealing ladders so that I can run cable through the ceiling between the two offices and get the old phones working temporarily. Surprisingly the building was built really well, so running the cables proved to be very difficult. I had assumed that I would be able to use a regular female-female cat5 adapter to go from the 6pin phone system to the 8pin cat5 cable that I had access to. I got home at ~2:30am and hadn't gotten far enough to test my theory.

    Wednesday Dec 21: More phone fun

    The day starts with moving furnature at 7:00am. When 9:00am hits I pull out my cell and call telus again. I give the tech my trouble ticket number, and he says he has no idea what I'm talking about. Whats a trouble ticket? That number doesn't make any sense!

    So I give him the manager ECR number, and he knows what this is, but doesn't have access to look at the details for it. So this means I'm on the phone for another hour explaining the situation again, and repeating the stupid tier 1 troubleshooting stuff. Eventually he tells me that he is going to schedule a technician to come and look at our system. Since its near xmas, someone should be free by the end of the month.

    At this point I hand the phone off to my dad, and from the sounds of it he ended up going through the same hoops I did. The tech is scheduled for the 30th of Dec., and my dad is left to run his business with only his cell phone. His 5585 number forwards to his cell after 4 rings, but it means that his secretary is useless, and he can only take 1 call at a time, etc...

    He is confident for some reason that the internet will be up and running soon, so gets me to prioritize on setting up the wiring for the PBX that I built and his network (the contractors basically just left 16 unlabled, naked cat5 cables poking out of the middle of the room, so I have no clue where each wire leads, and have to crip an end on each end of each cable before I can even test them). The idea was that his computer system is more important than his phone system at this point, so I concentrate on this.

    At ~2pm someone from telus calls regarding my ECR #, and surprisingly they actually promise that a tech will show up on Wednesday afternoon. This is still really really dumb, but its a hell of a lot better than the 30th.

    I don't trust that they will actually get it running, so I get back to trying to get the old phones to work. I wasted a lot of time on this, and as it turned out I had to splice the wires together to make my extension from the old office over and couldn't just use a female-female connector. I had a dentist appt, so it took till after business hours before I got any of the old phones connected.

    Thursday Dec 22: Goddamn stupid telus

    So we ran into more problems on Thursday right away. It turns out that sometime at the end of the day one of the people helping move saw a box full of the old style phones in the old office, and assumed that the two that were in his new office were there by mistake (the new phones were sitting on the desk just waiting for internet access). Of course a different person took it upon themselves to take that box home. We were back to having NO phones again... This is getting really bad.

    Last edited by Canadian*Sniper; 03-22-2006, 07:53 PM.

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    • #3

      I manage to steal a single phone from the guys next door, but it is programed to ring on his number, not on my dad's 5585 number, so that means that my dad's secretary has to notice a little flashing red light for his three lines in order to pick up a call. She isn't the quickest to begin with AND there is only one phone anyway...

      ~10:30am the Telus tech shows up. At ~11:30am he tells us that there isn't anything wrong at our end - it looks like they must have cancelled our DSL service. You'll have to order it again.

      ...Yes, thats right.

      So my dad gets on the phone, and starts raising hell. Basically they told him that they would be able to turn his DSL service on again by January 5th.

      Ok, now lets take a step back here. Remember that I've spent many hours with tech support 'troubleshooting' my internet connection. I even suggested that this might be the problem. They spent the money to send out a technician to fix the 'problem on my end'.

      WHAT THE HELL DID THEY THINK THEY WERE TROUBLESHOOTING IF I DIDN'T EVEN HAVE AN ACTIVE ACCOUNT?!?

      And moreso, all that they need to do to reactivate the account is to go to the server room, and flick a switch. Part of the conversation between the sales guy and my dad went like this:

      "It took you guys no time at all to disconnect my service. Spend five minutes and reconnect it."
      'mumbojumbo'
      "What building is your server room in? Give me the address. I will go down there and flick the switch myself"
      'mumbojumbo'
      "Well who is in charge of that. Give me their name and phone number and I will hold their hand and walk them to the room to do it."

      (etc. etc.)

      Eventually the best we got out of them was a promise to call my cell that afternoon to see if the process could be sped up at all.

      So around 11:30 or so I called Shaw. That conversation went something like this:

      "I have a business and Telus fucked me over. Please help me"
      'Ok, I'll see what I can do'
      (hold)
      'What time will you be in tomorrow?'
      "7:30"
      'ok, we will have someone there between 7:30 and 8 to install the service for you'


      There were NO existing cable lines in this building at all - none. Zero. At 2:00pm on Thursday, two cable guys showed up and ran the cable connection into the new suite.

      All that Telus had to do was flick a switch. The infrastructure was already in place. Shaw was starting from scratch, and had managed to run cable before Telus had managed to call me back to let me know if they would be able to flick the switch and give me back the DSL connection that they (without authorization) cancelled.

      Friday Dec 23: Interesting...

      So Telus never did call me, and at 7:45am, the Shaw guys showed up with a modem and some forms to sign. By 8:00am we had internet. By the end of the day his new VoIP phones were working perfectly... Save one issue.

      My dad's clients all have his 5585 phone number, and the new VoIP system has its own phone number, so what we did was set up call forwarding so that incoming calls from 5585 would forward to the new system.

      Telus managed to screw this up too however. What we asked for was 'multi-line forwarding'. What we got was 'single-line forwarding'. That means that if a client calls 5585, they are forwarded to the new system. Once the call is picked up, the 5585 number really shouldn't have anything to do with the system anymore. What really happens is that until that original call has been ended, any new calls to 5585 get a busy signal.

      This required another call to Telus, and has resulted in a trouble ticket being issued. Eventually they'll get around to letting my dad have all of his calls forwarded, but until then he can only talk to one person at a time on his * line system. Brilliant...

      Since we now had working internet, I decided to call Telus up and get them to re-cancel the DSL account. Of course this isn't possible till December 28th since the accounts dept is closed till then. I ended up talking to a tech support guy again, and he told me that there was nothing wrong with my internet connection. During the time I was on hold, I plugged the DSL modem in, and guess what - he was right! Holy shit - they did something right!

      I thanked him and hung up. Within 5 seconds of hanging up the green DSL light started flashing red. I can just see the techy sitting there

      "Oh, so you don't want our internet? WELL YOU CAN'T HAVE IT SUCKER!"

      Stay tuned for more developments.

      Comment


      • #4
        Yeah, phone companies are inept and unresponsive as hell.
        Quakeone.com - Being exactly one-half good and one-half evil has advantages. When a portal opens to the antimatter universe, my opposite is just me with a goatee.

        So while you guys all have to fight your anti-matter counterparts, me and my evil twin will be drinking a beer laughing at you guys ...

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by Baker
          I briefly worked at a Verizon DSL Support call center in 2004 (outsourced). We provided just about the sh*ttiest customer support imaginable and, no kidding, the goal at that place was basically to get the customer off the phone. There were patrols called "floor monitors" that would harass you if your call was more than 10 minutes. These guys typically knew jack sh*t about the job.
          Floor Monitors?? This crap actually exists?

          I will find you... it's only a matter of time.

          Comment


          • #6
            Time Studies are still used today to.

            Also regarding SBC and AT&T.. what is ironic is that AT&T prevented SBC from offering Long Distance service for their customers which limited who your long distance came from BUT.. AT&T was allowed to offer local calling? The idea was that SBC if offering Long Distance and Local would put them back into the Ma Bell scenario that was required by law to break up yadda yadda yadda. The recently they were allowed to offer long distance. Now again.. AT&T merged with SBC.. is this all looking familiar??? So were heading back to the way it was.. lol This is kind of how the Lottery works..Money for the schools indeed. Ours wont ever see a dime the way it's set up
            www.Net-Tyme.com
            Lifes a game.. It's time to Play!
            Quake.net-tyme.com Pick your Poison.

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by Grim
              Floor Monitors?? This crap actually exists?
              Yes. The whole place was like a revolving door, people quit all the time and they hired new people all the time. At one point in time, you had to pass some tests to get hired there, but later on the only requirement was that you had a heartbeat.

              They made a (very wrong) list of checkpoints for the newbies to follow that mostly involved telling the customer to restart their computer or call their computer manufacturer and have them format their hard drive.

              The screen had a call log where you see how many times they called and when, it was not uncommon to have customers that had called 30 or 40 within a month.

              One tactic used to get people off the phone was to "send them a new modem." This would end the conversation, get them off the phone. It was also never the problem and it was done in all sorts of situations that made no sense. I didn't do this, except if the customer was being real rude.

              Remember how they had sent Stephy a "new modem" and she didn't think that was the problem? Unless the status lights don't light up, the modem is almost certainly working just fine.
              Quakeone.com - Being exactly one-half good and one-half evil has advantages. When a portal opens to the antimatter universe, my opposite is just me with a goatee.

              So while you guys all have to fight your anti-matter counterparts, me and my evil twin will be drinking a beer laughing at you guys ...

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by Net-Tyme
                This is kind of how the Lottery works..
                Yeah, they always say the lottery proceeds go to schools and they never do.
                Quakeone.com - Being exactly one-half good and one-half evil has advantages. When a portal opens to the antimatter universe, my opposite is just me with a goatee.

                So while you guys all have to fight your anti-matter counterparts, me and my evil twin will be drinking a beer laughing at you guys ...

                Comment

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