Customer Service

     “What’s that wire in my yard coming over the fence?” Brian asked.

      “That’s our internet connection,” I replied. 

       “It’s a good thing I asked.  I was thinking to tear it out.”

      “Don’t do that.  I won’t have any internet.”

      “You might want to do something with it.  Mickey would like to get a hold of it.  He can probably chew through it pretty fast.”  Mickey was Brian’s St. Bernard puppy.

      “It’s a temporary line.  They are supposed to come replace it with a permanent line. At least that’s what Carol (the previous owner) told us.”

       Thus began another great adventure with corporate America customer service.  This began in the fall  of 2015 when Mickey was fairly new to the neighborhood.  Several calls to Century Link got little response.  One tech came out, took a look at the setup and said it would be difficult to install a permanent line, Century Link doesn’t do the installation, it’s contracted out.

     That was the last we heard for a few months.  In the meantime, Brian decided Mickey was really too big for his yard and “rehomed” him with a family with an acreage.  We decided that nevertheless, we had better insist Century Link do something about the temporary line. 

     It was a bit of a pain.  It crossed the sidewalk where I nearly always hooked it with a snow shovel when doing the walk.  It was there a trip hazard every week when rolling out the trash container.  I had worked around it where it went up over the shed that I had reroofed when I did the house.  It drooped along the fence to where it crossed over into Brian’s yard, and finally over the other neighbor’s fence to the pedestal in his yard.

       The Goodwife persevered, spending a goodly long time on hold waiting for the next customer representative to answer.  Finally, a tech came out.  He wanted to look into the pedestal.  He and the Goodwife went to the neighbor’s house and rang the bell.  No answer.  His pickup was there and his garage door was open.  She rang again.

      Out came the neighbor buzzing like an angry hornet.  He chewed them out good, saying he was a day sleeper and they had awakened him and he wasn’t at all happy about that.  The tech got into the neighbor's yard and looked into the pedestal. 

      A week or so later, two more techs came out.  This time, the Goodwife left the day-sleeper a note on an 8.5 X 11 sheet of paper taped to his garage door where he couldn’t miss it.  Please call.  No response so the techs went in.

       When they opened up the pedestal, they discovered there was already a permanent line installed.  So they removed the temporary line and hooked us up to the old line.

      It doesn’t take a mental giant to know what happened next.  Our internet service went down the tubes.  Hey boys, there was a reason your company installed the temporary line in the first place.  That old permanent line had a problem.

       We had some service,  but as for speed, it rivaled the old dialup connections.  It worked in the morning, got progressively worse during the day, sometime at night being so poor we couldn’t get connected to the internet at all.  Thus began a series of calls to customer service, with accumulative wait times amounting to over an hour.

       One guy in the Philippines thought he could get us connected from there.  After about thirty minutes of wait time, the Goodwife suffered a dropped call.  Here we go again.  This time, the gal, also in the Philippines, couldn’t make a connection.  “There’s a problem with your line.”  Really?  A tech would call on Tuesday.

      The tech called Tuesday morning.  The internet was working, not real well, but it was working.  It’s your modem, the guy said.  Really, I asked.  Just a coincidence that the modem stopped working when the boys removed the temporary line?

      I asked him to come back late in the afternoon when he might find it not working so well.  He gave us his phone number.  We called three times.  He didn’t show up that afternoon, or any other time. 

     The third time the Goodwife called a few days later, the tech didn’t remember a thing about it.  He didn’t even remember being here.  Anyway, call him after 4 p.m.  The Goodwife called right after 4 p.m. and got a message.  He would be out of the office until August 29, the message said.  He was on vacation.    

       Back to customer service.  This time, the Goodwife set up an appointment for the tech to come in the afternoon when the internet wouldn’t be working very well and I could be there. The appointed day arrived.  I left for Ft. Collins to meet with my quartet at 9:30 a.m.  I wasn’t gone fifteen minutes before the Goodwife called me to say the tech was there.  Tell him to come back in the afternoon.  That didn’t work.

       She called an hour or so later.  Our problem was (no, not the modem) old house wiring.  The house was wired in the ‘90’s and we were losing a lot of signal by having the modem at the far end of the house.  They moved the modem to the other end of the house where it was closer to the telephone box on the outside wall.

      This guy did say he would come back and explain it all to me in the afternoon.  I’ve heard that before.  But this guy, Kelly, did show up.  He went through the old wiring bit, and I agreed the wiring was old.  I explained we had fairly decent service until they removed the temporary line, when our problems began.

      Then he admitted the wire from alley to house wasn’t the best connection.  He changed the wires to what he thought were the best of the bundle of wires in the cable.  Why was the temporary wire installed in the first place?  The old wire needed to be replaced, he finally agreed.  We needed to deal with the neighbor, so the wife put up another note on the neighbor’s garage door with Kelly’s phone number.

     I really figured I would never hear from Kelly again, especially when he explained he was only a part-time Century Link employee, his main job being a fireman in the Denver area, but two days later he called me.  The neighbor had called Kelly and told him to go ahead and do what he needed to do, and asked him not to bother him as he was a day sleeper.  Kelly said to me, I wonder why the neighbor doesn’t put a sign on his door that he is a day-sleeper.  The tech’s respect that.

      Kelly’s solution is to reinstall a temporary line and order a new permanent line.  It will take at least four weeks before the permanent line can be installed.  A contractor has to come out and appraise the situation and strike a deal with Century Link.  So here we are, right about where we were two years ago, or at least we will be when the “temporary” line is reinstalled.

     For my part of the bargain, I have agreed to run a dedicated phone line from the outdoor box on our wall to wherever we want the modem.  I agreed to do that if they would get us off the old permanent line.  We shall see what happens.

     In the meantime, when I think of customer service, I’m reminded of an episode in The Grapes of Wrath.  One of the migrants (can’t say “Okie”, a good friend from Oklahoma bristles when he hears that.  “I am an Oklahoman,” he insists) who thinks he is getting a raw deal at a roadside service station tells the service station guy a story.

      The story involves the custom of the neighbors bringing a cow or heifer to the one neighbor who has a bull for breeding purposes.  In the story, Little Willy Feely takes his dad’s heifer to be bred.  When he gets there, the only one home is the bull owner’s teenage daughter.  They both know the routine, so they turn the heifer into the corral with the bull.  Then they climb up on the fence to watch the action.

     When the action gets hot and heavy with the bull and the heifer, Willy starts squirming around on the fence.  He says, “Boy, I sure wish I was doing that,” indicating the action in the corral.

      “Why don’t ya, Willy?” the girl replies.  “It’s your heifer.”

     The migrant then tells the service station guy, “Every time I see the sign ‘Service Station’, I wonder who’s getting screwed.”

      Anyone who has dealt with corporate America’s customer service department has to wonder the same thing, I think.