Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!bellcore!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway From: zygot!john@apple.com (John Higdon) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: BOCs and Regionals Message-ID: Date: 27 Aug 89 20:15:32 GMT Organization: Green Hills and Cows Lines: 63 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 328, message 7 of 8 In article , faigin@aerospace.aero. org writes: > (Which reminds me of a story of a PacBell customer who > moved to a GTE area, and then received a sympathy card from PacBell :-) ) Which reminds me of a story that happened to myself. Here in the Silly Con Vallee we are served exclusively by Pac*Bell except for the *town* of Los Gatos, which has six prefixes of the Great Telephone Experiment. (For those who are jumping to their keyboards to correct me, Morgan Hill (GTE) and Gilroy (Contel) are not really in the metro area.) Anyway, a radio station that I contract with does periodic remote broadcasts from various businesses, usually on Saturdays. For these broadcasts they like to have a phone line installed to provide contact with the studio and to handle last-minute details that may come up. (They haven't been bitten by the Cellular Bug yet.) This is usually a piece of cake. You pick up the phone, dial 811-0997, tell the person you want a temporary telephone line installed at [address] on [Friday the whatever], disconnected on [Monday the whatever], billed to the station, touch tone, no carrier, RJ11C jack. Done. The person at the other end gives you the order #, the disconnect order #, the phone number and that's that. Without fail, these lines have been there waiting for every broadcast. But then they wanted to broadcast from a car dealership in Los Gatos. So I call this 800 number that sends me to someone in Thousand Oaks (Thousand Jokes). I tell them that I want a phone line installed. "What is the address of your business?" I give them the dealers address. "Will this be addtional service?" No it will be new service. "What is your social security number?" That's a little personal. This sort of exchange went on for over thirty minutes. This person at the other end had no concept of a "temporary" exchange telephone line. I got stuff like "We'll have to bill you for a full month". Well, of course. I had to pry the phone number and the order numbers out of him. Throughout the transaction, I kept asking if there was a special department that handled this type of transaction. No, there wasn't. The day of the broadcast, Saturday, we arrived to find a jack labeled with the station's call letters, but it was dead. We called repair and they sent a burly phone man out who complained bitterly about being called out on his day off. He went into the back room and fooned around for about an hour, then came out and said there was nothing wrong with the line. When I plugged a 2500D set into the jack and showed him it was dead, he said that of course it was dead--that wire wasn't connected in the phone room. Could he connect it? Well, he could, but it would cost us $95 extra. What? $95 extra to have what I ordered actually work? When I became visibly agitated, he pointed across the street (where the CO was) and told me that building has the most advanced switching equipment in the world (a GTD5, but he probably didn't know that) and that he was sick of people putting down his great company. I told him it didn't matter what was in that building, if there was no dial tone on the jack it was useless to me. He finally connected it in the phone room, and later I found out that the station had a go-round with GTE over an extra $95 charge. Is it any wonder that there are people who literally red-line areas of the state and refuse to consider living in any area served by GTE? -- John Higdon | P. O. Box 7648 | +1 408 723 1395 john@zygot.uucp | San Jose, CA 95150 | M o o !