Telco Blues
Bellsouth is getting close to a “sucks” blog. They supposedly hooked up the phone last week when the floor was being installed. It wasn’t working yesterday so I called for them to come out today. No one called my cell and the phone still doesn’t work so I called them up. Here is a summary of the conversation.
“Our system shows that your phone line is working.”
“Have you used the phone in my house? It’s not working. Did anyone come out to fix it?”
“Well we tested the line and it shows it’s working. Your hardware is probably broken. We called to tell you that.”
“We’ve tested multiple phones on different jacks with nothing else connected — it’s NOT the equipment. No one from Bellsouth called my cell and no voicemail was left.”
“Oh. Well, I can schedule someone to come out there tomorrow.”
“I called you yesterday to come fix it today.”
“(Pause) When is a good time for a technician to come out and look at it tomorrow?”
Good grief!
June 21st, 2006 at 10:32 am
David - I;ve been there dude. It’s no fun.
If you take a known to be working cordED phone which requires no external power and plug it in on the outside of your home in the part of the telephone demark that is accessible by you, you can confirm if Bellsouth’s service has reached your house. If you get a dial tone there but not on the inside, it could be your wiring internally or the phones you have plugged in inside.
One time my phones flaked out (ring twice then hang up) due to a bad handset on the inside of the house. The tech that came out to check out the incoming connection, which was good at the demark, graciously told me to unplug all my phones in the house and plug each one back in individually and then call the house from my cell phone. This was a way to keep Bellsouth from coming inside and charging insane amounts of money to find the issue. This is how we found the bad phone.
June 21st, 2006 at 3:48 pm
Okay so we now have phone service. The technician was very polite. I think I will email about their automated customer services process though.
Gripe 1: When you transfer your phone service from one house to another, a technician comes out to do the work but doesn’t check to see if the phone actually works.
Gripe 2: When you call for help and the system check appears to be fine even though the inside of the house could be broken, they close the ticket by default.
In our case, there was dial tone getting to the box but some wires were disconnected that actualy get the signal into the house. You’d think the original technician would see that when they activated the line.
June 22nd, 2006 at 9:55 am
Good to here you are up and talking.
Your comment addresses what I was trying to get at. Bellsouth’s service to the house is separate from service in the house.
Separating the two is a means of greater revenue generation…