Barbara J. Hamby

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In My Day

The saga of the errant telephone company resumed today. When I returned from shopping, there was no dial tone on my phone. I waited a few minutes and tried both the cordless and the cord phone and, again, no dial tone. So I began the tedious process of reporting the outage to a recording. To each question the disembodied voice asks, she suggests two possible answers. If neither of those applies, too bad. She had all kinds of instructions for me to check out the lines inside and outside my dwelling, but if I didn’t want to do that, she would send a technician out at a minimum cost of twenty-five dollars. By the time I finished with this long, difficult call made on my cell phone, the dial tone had mysteriously reappeared on my house phones. I called back to cancel the technician’s visit, and got the same recording. Eventually, the recorder lost patience with my non-responsive answers, and connected me to a real person. In about three seconds, she told me she had canceled the service call. I’ll let you know later if a technician shows up tomorrow. I wouldn’t bet on that, one way or the other.

When I talked to my daughter later, she told me of her experience with the same phone company. She and her husband will be moving this weekend, so she had called to get the phone service transferred next Monday and was assured it would be done. Five minutes after she hung up, she picked up her phone and it was already disconnected and transferred to the new location, so she had to call back and get them to undo that. Does anybody care that nobody knows what they’re doing at these modern companies? In my day, as other old folks say, they would not have been able to stay in business with the quality of “service” they provide.