15 Print "Or Ability to Program"

Having started the SBC tale, I feel obliged to finish it. Sadly, it is not a tale of redemption for the corporation.

Yesterday (Thursday) morning I called the house, and the phone line was working. "Great," I though. "They've come out and fixed the problem." But a few minutes later I received a message on my cell phone from SBC saying that they would come out some time on Friday. Then they left a toll-free number to call if that was a bad time.

Unfortunately, I didn't get that message until after business hours. When I called the number left on message, it asked for the phone number that needed service. Although it no longer needed service, I put in my home phone number. The automated service clicked along, then came with a message saying that the phone line was not in operation (that's the line I was making the call from).  The SBC line then said please hold, they were transferring me to another line.  The other line said that I had called after business hours, please call back. Or, I could press "1" to talk to an after-hours operator. An operator! I was thrilled!  Finally I was able to speak to a real person and tell them that the problem had been solved. But, the "after-hours operator" was nothing more than a message restating business hours. Extremely helpful.

So, I sent an e-mail telling them not to bother to come out. By this morning they had responded that the service call had been cancelled.  

So, this gets me thinking . . . have they implemented a system whereby service for the phone lines is beyond horrible? Because it isn't the people doing the service that's a problem, its the people who have programmed the voice mail / phone answering system. Which, you would think, would be something SBC would excel at. But maybe there's no money in phones. Maybe they're just trying to get everyone to do everything by e-mail. Truly, I could live with that.