Reach Out and Choke Someone

I have long advocated supporting small, local businesses instead of big, national chains, even if it cost me some extra money, and even when I've been mocked by friends and family. Call me old fashioned, but I agree with what Garrison Keillor wrote in Lake Wobegon Days: You might like the Calvin Klein jeans you bought at the mall, but Calvin is not going to come with the rescue squad when your house catches fire. The guy who owns the store in town might.

So I buy groceries at the supermarket down the street --- the one my friend Dan calls "The House of Rancid Lunchmeat" --- even though I know I could probably save 10 or 20 percent and find a better selection at one of the two Wal-Marts near me. (The cost might be my eternal soul.)

That said, I went over to the dark side of the force yesterday. After two years with an independent telephone company, I'm dumping them for the biggest, baddest monopoly of them all, Verizon. (If they're not the Dark Side of the Force, then why is James Earl "Darth Vader" Jones their spokesman?)

I'm not going to mention which phone company I had, except that they aren't far from Our Fair City and they bill themselves as a "hometown phone company." Well, that may be true if your hometown is Amityville, because their service (at least in my experience) has been one horror show after another.

Call the company's office to ask a question, and you spent several minutes punching through various voice mail options, only to learn that the person you needed to talk to had gone home for the day. If you actually reached a human being, after numerous attempts, they either didn't know the answer or cheerfully gave you the wrong answer.

...

Yes, cheerful. The one thing they've had going for them, despite their incompetence, has been their relentless niceness. Oh, sure, they couldn't provide service that would have been acceptable in a third-world country, but they were very friendly about it.

When I moved last year, I called several days ahead of time to make sure the telephone was hooked up at the new house. A nice lady --- I'll call her "Barbara" --- took the information and assured me that two days later, they'd disconnect service at the old address and connect it at the new address.

Three days later, a repairman was nowhere in sight. I called the phone company: "We don't have anyone named Barbara here," said "Susan." Well, could I put in the order with Susan? No, I could not. Susan would have to have Bonnie call me back. Bonnie assured me that, absolutely, positively, they could move the phone line two days hence.

Two days hence, they disconnected the old phone, all right. But they didn't connect it at the new place.

Called back. Talked to Tracey, who said they didn't have a "Susan" or a "Bonnie," but they'd surely connect me by the end of the week. Will there be a message on my old number, saying that I'd moved? Sure, Tracey said, full of sunshine and chipperness.

Yep, the phone worked the next day. But people started calling me at work: What happened? When they called my old number, it said it had been disconnected, and no further information was available. So I called "Tracey." If you've read this far, you know what happened next. "John" said they didn't have a "Tracey" there, and there was no work order on my account asking for a re-direct message on my old number. Couldn't they do it now? Nope, said John, full of apologies. It was too late.

For this "service," I paid $65 to have my phone line moved from one address to another.

...

Even the simplest task seemed to be beyond their ken. Take ordering phone books. That's a pretty simple job, I think. You call up the phone company, ask for a phone book, and they mail it to you. At this phone company, I called the office, navigated 47 layers of voice mail, and reached "Bob," who happily took the information, wrote it down onto a piece of paper, hung up the phone, and then went out to the hallway, where he turned my order into a goddamned paper airplane and sailed it out into the lobby.

The final straw came this summer. I arrived home and found the message light blinking on the answering machine, but when I played back the messages, all I got was a nasty humming sound. I figured the answering machine had died, until I picked up the telephone, and heard the same nasty buzzsaw noise on the receiver. So I unplugged all of my phones and went outside to the telephone network interface box, where I disconnected my wires and plugged the phone directly into the company's wiring: The noise was on their line.

The noise vanished that night. Then it came back. Then it vanished. And then a few days later, I lost all service --- no dial tone, no nothing, except some static.

...

I called the phone company. "Joe" at repair service assured me that a repairman would be out the next day. Three days later, I had dial tone, and I was perfectly happy until a bill arrived at the end of the week for $155. I called the phone company in a white-hot fury. "Our repairman didn't find any trouble when he got there," "Hank" said. "So you were billed for an unfounded trouble call. The problem must be in your home wiring."

"The problem is not in my home wiring," I said. "When I unplug my wiring from your network, and listen to your lines, the noise is still there. How do you explain that?"

"Well, it certainly sounds like it's in our network, then," he said. Would he take the charge off of my bill? No, he would not.

The following day, the buzzsaw noise returned, and it's been more or less a constant presence ever since. It's a lot of fun, and very professional, when your boss calls the house and you get to scream back and forth over what sounds like a B-29 revving its engines in the background.

The company's repair service very sweetly said they'd investigate ... for another $155. Maybe, they suggested, I could keep a record of when the problem occurred? That would help them track down the source. So, I started taping the interference, in preparation for filing a complaint against them with the FCC, the state Public Utility Commission, and anyone else who would listen, up to and including the Department of Agriculture.

Then I called my "hometown phone company" ... only to learn that they'd sold my account to another provider in Philadelphia.

...

Well, that was it. I put up with this for more than two years because this was a local company, but if they weren't local any more, either, then screw them. I began investigating other options for local phone service. You know, Pennsylvanians have a choice now for their local utilities.

I started by visiting the state's website, utilitychoice.org, only to find that the state let the domain name expire, and it's been taken over by someone else. Another website, operated by the PUC, is full of dead links and incorrect information. (One company I called said they offered Internet service, but not phone. Another said they never offered service in Allegheny County. Several have gone out of business.)

I also called the biggest independent phone company in the Pittsburgh area, whose name will not be mentioned here, either. Despite the fact that their service map clearly shows that they operate in the Mon-Yough area, the salesperson couldn't seem to locate my address in her computer. She's "checking" on the problem. I expect she still will be several days from now, but they've lost a sale in the meantime.

You call this utility choice? Some choice! I say "ptui" to these choices. Yes, the other phone company was cheaper than Verizon, but my phone only worked about 50 percent of the time, and my bill sure wasn't 50 percent cheaper.

By comparison, Verizon was a breeze to deal with --- frankly, they always have been, in my experience, dating back to the Bell Telephone days. They're charging me $12 to switch my service, not the $65 my other company charged. They even caught me in a weak moment and asked if I wanted DSL service ... I didn't, but they offered it to me for $7 less than I'm paying for my current dial-up connection. And they're sending a free DSL modem.

I guess I'm giving up my current Internet provider, which I've had since 1997, and which I've been largely happy with over the past three years. (I wasn't always happy under their previous ownership.) The company is Winbeam in Greensburg, and I would not hesitate to recommend them.

...

So, I'm hooked back up to the Death Star, starting tomorrow. Hopefully, the problems will go away --- or if they don't, at least, perhaps, someone with an IQ above room temperature will be handling them. I don't mind if they're evil, so long as I can actually complete an intelligible telephone call (making my calls sound intelli-gent is probably beyond even the abilities of George Lucas).

And if it means I've betrayed my principles, well, feel free to call me up and complain. At least I'll be able to hear you.