Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!fernwood!apple!bionet!hayes.ims.alaska.edu!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: john@mojave.ati.com (John Higdon) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Broken Phone While Out of Town Message-ID: <14364@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 5 Nov 90 10:18:38 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Organization: TELECOM Digest Lines: 25 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu David Lesher writes: > Unlike the clerks I was talking to, I have heard why they went to the > INWATS. It seems the beancounters wanted centralized afterhours repair > centers. Sound familiar, PAT? But the union had a fit that all the > calls went to one place, and thus those folks got all the premium pay. > So the responding center had to rotate nightly. Well, it's good to hear that there is a telco that is even more inept than Pac*Bell. For a decade and a half Pac*Bell has been diverting 611 calls to rotating centralized locations all over California without much customer inconvenience. Some of the machinations that the crossbar switches had to go through were fun to listen to: "Please hold for telephone repair service..." If you hit a '*', you could dump the device and get dial tone that belonged to telco and do many mean and nasty things. Unfortunately, preset translations to central routing points are used now and all the fun is gone. If I dial '611' on a weekend, there is a significant possiblity that the person who answers will be in Anaheim or even San Diego. John Higdon (hiding out in the desert)