March 20, 2004
A Random Rant Against Telecommunications Companies
Sometime past three in the morning is no time to post a personal rampage against anything, let alone telecommunications companies. But we are being visited by a ripple effect of our last DSL outage back in January -- you know, the one where Qwest wrongfully killed our landline, and therefore our DSL, as the result of a mis-timed request from Speakeasy.
For some reason, it never occured to us that our long hours on the telephone with these companies trying to get that mess sorted out would come back to haunt us.
But, of course, the only way to spend all those hours agruing with support personnel was to use our cellular phone (since, obviously, our landline was non-existant, which was the entire point of all of those support conversations).
Well, silly us for not realizing at the time that these support calls were, of course, all being made during the day, because you can't make them at night. And daytime, of course, is peak time as far as cellular minutes are concerned.
So, lo and behold, our cellular telephone bill has overage usage that hovers around 10-15 times normal, creating a balance due far beyond normal. And thereby threatening, of course, to now kill off our cellular telephone service.
All because our cellular telecommunications service was the only way we had to fight through the long never-ending support conversations with two other telecommunications services.
Perhaps this entire realm of electronic communications really is over-rated. Perhaps we should devolve ourselves to pend and paper and simply staple poorly-mimeographed hand-scrawled coverage of Portland to telephone poles all over town.
Rant over. We now return you, for the time being anyway, to our regularly-scheduled programming.
Comments (4)
Noah on 20 Mar 2004
I say that you should send the bill to Speakeasy or Qwest. Whoever you feel was responsible for the outage in the first place should be paying for your extra time on the cell phone.
mph on 20 Mar 2004
The "for the time being" sounds ominous.
Two months straight of late checks from my big contract forced me to learn the vagaries of Qwest billing. I ended up going three days without cellular service as a result, but DSL (via Speakeasy) and my hardline stayed intact.
The lesson I learned from a reluctant Qwest employee:
Non-regulated services (wireless) can't be tabulated as part of your balance for purposes of cutting off regulated services (landline). So if you're past due on the wireless/unregulated chunk of your bill they can't threaten your hardline with disconnection unless you fail to pay up that part of the bill. And they'll do the math for you if you make them, at which point you can force them to read the little script assuring you that they won't kill your landline.
The guy I dealt with tried to make me feel like shit for pushing the issue. I'm not sure if that was a matter of policy or him just wanting to get back to his game of solitaire. My mother works for a telco and I'm inclined to assume they don't want to step through it with you because they're on a quota and it's easier to say "pay it all or we'll cut you off" rather than risk not making their piece rate for the hour, which affects their chances of getting a raise.
"The customer's always wronged," I guess.
The One True b!X on 20 Mar 2004
The "for the time being" sounds ominous.
That was just me being tired and cranky.
Damon on 22 Mar 2004
There are other options out there besides the big 'Q'... I happen to be employed by (but am not an authorised representative of, my opinions are my own, etc.) a particular telecommmunications company moving to the Lloyd district soon that focuses on Small/Medium businesses. There is life without Qwest, and it is good.
My 2 bits...