Why Century Link should cancel my phone service.
Century Link, formerly Embarq, formerly Sprint telephone should cancel my phone service. You see the house where we have it, is way out on a rural road in Ohio. There are probably only maybe 10 houses on our whole street. The telephone company was nice enough to bury the telephone lines when they put them in, right along side the drainage ditch along the road. This is great since when tree's and other things fall down, they don't take out the telephone line. Plus when they come repair them they don't need special trucks or anything.
On the other hand though, I did mention it is in the rural country right? So we have a few farmers around, and mice, and rain, and other fun things people in the cities don't quite think about. Well they get in the telephone boxes, or knock them over with their tractors, and lots of other things happen to them, like say having a farmer plug their electric fence into them etc. All of which make your home phone line buzz, hiss, crackle, and barely usable.
Well the kind people rolled out internet access to us a few years ago, which puts even more burden on them ensuring the phone line is working perfectly. As humans with nice good ears, we can make out the words from the noise, and somehow manage to coordinate a conversation in some rudimentary fashion. Well these computers are a different story, they demand perfect yes and no answers coming across the telephone lines each and every time. Otherwise your internet speed drops down to a crawl, or halts completely.
So with that background, once we got the internet at the house, I have been making regularly scheduled phone calls to our phone company to fix the internet. The mice or ice, or tractors seem to knock something around in our phone wires about once every two months. So once every two months I call and have them come out and fix it. That has to cost a pretty penny, I mean at least 15 minutes on the phone with them, talking to two or three departments. Their software to coordinate my ticket, dispatching, gasoline, parts, time, labor, etc. Has to easily cost them $150-200 dollars each time I call in. My phone bill is less than $100 a month. You do the math. They have to be losing money over the course of a year. Especially when they say they will fix it by Tuesday, and they don't then I call in and they give me a partial credit for the down time.
The frustrating part is, figuring out how to get them to be more aware of the problem, and fix it once more permanently. Put in some mouse traps, make the area fenced off so the tractors cant run it over. Something! But no each time I call I have to re-explain my case to them. The other time I told them I was out of town. They said they couldn't schedule a repair ticket unless I was there so they could walk me through their normal troubleshooting steps, which never produce results, but do frustrate me to no end. So I again have to go against my believes, to lie to them. I hang up, and call back, pretend I'm there, explain my situation about having them come out so often, pretend to do the steps they want me to do, to finally get a ticket opened for them to come out and fix the box down the street further that the mice got into again. So that the next time I am home I can have perfect (hopefully) phone service.
I'm stumped though, how do you propose I get them to fix it?
