My Adventure with The Phone Company

Having finally broken down and decided to spring for DSL, I found I basically had two choices:  Earthlink, which is unacceptable because its founder is an arrant ISORMite, and "SBC/Yahoo",  which means dealing with The Phone Company -- and Yahoo, which is also no great shakes.   Still, when I spotted a Best Buy ad that included a $100 "gift card" on top of the rebate for the full cost of the modem for SBC/Yahoo, which reduces the committed-to year at ~$27/mo. to an  effective ~$19/mo. I decided it was the lesser of the evils.

March 6: Best Buy's first available activation date was 3/14, complete w/ choose between  morning and afternon, implying it was a firm thing.  But the "kiosk" that was done through had a defective printer and by the time the other kiosk was available the earliest activation date was 3/15, seemingly further implying it was firm.

By the time I got home from the store, the following had e-arrived:

> Date Sun, 6 Mar 2005 181454 -0800 (PST)
> From SBC Yahoo DSL Web Order <Websrvcs@camail.sbc.com>
> To firstmap@yahoo.com
> Subject Order Received for SBC Yahoo! DSL
>
> Dear michael padlipsky,
>
> Your order for SBC Yahoo! DSL has been received and is being
> processed. Our records indicate that you have requested your SBC
> Yahoo! DSL be activated on 310-670-4288.
>
> View your order status at http://www.sbc.com/dslorderstatus.
>
> If the date you selected for activating your SBC Yahoo! DSL becomes
> unavailable, we will assign you the next available date and notify
> you of the change. If you are not satisfied with the date, you may
> contact us to reschedule.
>
> We cannot guarantee that SBC Yahoo! DSL will work at your location
> until the service is installed (either through the self-install or
> the tech install process). SBC Internet Services will attempt to
> contact you prior to your installation date if problems arise.
>
>  
>
> Thank you for choosing SBC Yahoo! DSL. This is going to be fun!
>
> ****************
> We are here to help! If you have questions, please visit us at
> http//www.sbc.com/contact_us/
>
> SBC Yahoo! DSL is an information service that combines DSL transport,
> Internet access and applications from SBC Internet Services, with
> customized content, services, and applications from Yahoo! Inc., to
> provide the customer with high-speed broadband access to the World
> Wide Web. Further details on offers/packages provided during
> enrollment and registration. Acceptance of Terms of Service required.
>
> Copyright © 2005 SBC Internet Services and Yahoo! Inc. All Rights
> Reserved.
>
> PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE!
> All messages sent to this address are automatically deleted.


and sure enough, http://www.sbc.com/dslorderstatus showed an activation date of March 15 and a status of "Pending" -- which it continued to do whenever I checked over the next week.

Then, on March 14, the day before D-for-DSL Day on my refrigerator door calendar, along came:

> Subject Order Confirmation for SBC Yahoo! DSL-OM
> Date Mon, 14 Mar 2005 140842 -0800
> From "DSL SUPPORT TEAM" <DSLSTEAM@camail.sbc.com>
> To <firstmap@yahoo.com>
>
> Thank you for choosing SBC Yahoo!(r) DSL!
>  
> Your SBC Yahoo! DSL service on telephone number (310) 670-4288 will
> be
> activated on 03-21-2005.  For reference, your order number is
> N072279.
>
> If you have any questions regarding your order, please contact us at
> 1-800-579-7861.
>  
> SBC Yahoo! DSL Customer Service
>

No reference to the original date's having "become unavailable".  No apology.  No indication that the 800 number wasn't "24/7".  But at 5:55 p.m., it elicited a recorded message to the effect that "We're closed." and an explicit "Please call back during normal business hours", with, of course, no indication of what normal business hours were.

The flaws in that communication weren't surprising.  In the meantime, I'd already looked at the pathetic excuse for an "Installation Guide" that came with the DSL modem I'd gotten at Best Buy and noticed (to mention only the lowlights) that

(1) The first substantive page was all about installing "the Ethernet Adapter" PCI card.  So I immediately called my hardware-savvy friend to ask him to reserve the morning of the 15th, since I don't do hardware and there were dire warnings not to install anything until the line had  been activated.  After some discussion, and searching through the box, it turned out there was no network card, as they're called these years, in the box, despite the fact that the page hadn't said anything about "if your computer doesn't already have Ethernet connectability" -- nor, of course, had it said the "kit" did contain an "Ethernet Adapter", it merely strongly implied it.

(2) The "FAQ" about "what do I do if my DSL connection breaks and I can't browse the web" was answered with first reboot, second if that didn't work look at http://...  In other words, if you can't browse the web, go browse the web for help.

So I already knew the "corporate culture" was utterly lacking in verbal communication skills.

On to March 15.  When I called the cited 800 number I spent a fair amount of time talking to a helpful and friendly young man who eventually promised he'd put in a expedite request even though he didn't think it would help, and then passed me on to "Second-Tier Tech Support" to get the answers to the several questions I had about firewalls, "premium services", and the like, since he was actually "only in Sales".  I then spent a fair amount of time talking to a helpful and friendly young woman who did answer most of my questions, even volunteered a couple of  pieces of useful information I hadn't thought to ask for, and apologized for what she took to be the overwhelming likelihood that I wouldn't get activated until the 21st, and for all the communications foulups I'd mentioned in the course of the conversation (which had me afraid to even look at the "CD" [cd-rom, actually] attached to the inside cover of the pathetic excuse for a manual for fear any company that documented things as badly as SBC manifestly did wouldn't think of warning me that once it started it wouldn't stop).   [It turns out that out of curiosity eventually I did put it into my backup machine, where if it went wild it couldn't do any real harm, and discovered that not only didn't it have the hoped-for "real" manual, the only pdf files it did have were all about installing "the Ethernet Adapter".]

Both helpful and friendly people said "the order only was placed on the 14th", by the way, which I pointed out didn't make any sense to me since it had been in their system since the 6th and I could prove it (both from the message reproduced above and from the check-ins I'd been doing on the... /dslorderstatus "page"), but it clearly wasn't anything they could do anything about.

Finally, March 16.  There was a message on my answering machine (being an insomniac, I turn the phonebell off overnight, since calls before noon are anathema) from "SBCDSL", informing me that "Unfortunately, we will not be able to expedite the due date due to invalid reason.  The maintance company won't allow an expedite for thinking a due date was one day." and even better, "We do have to require someone to type up the order once they retrieve it from the database".  And concluding with an 800 number to call if I had questions.  (At least the call was from a live person, not a voicebot; so the 800 number was actually in a second message, not having fit in before the ansmach timed out on the first one.)

So I did that.  And naturally one of the points I emphasized during the ensuing conversation with still another pleasant and helpful young woman was that it struck me as incredible that anybody would have to be typing anything, much less a week after the information was all in their system as a whole and all their computers were on the 'Net.   Before I could ask for either a promise to get the expedite order rejection reconsidered or a supervisor, my phone line went dead.

And stayed dead.  I.e., can't even hang up and get a dial tone.

In fact, as I write this it's still dead (11 p.m., 3/16).

So I went across the street and borrowed a phone to call the 800 number again, thinking that perhaps "Lydia" had keeled over, unnoticed in a cubicle somewhere, and her phone was still "off hook".  Well, according to the still another pleasant and helpful young woman, that wasn't the case, but there did seem to be trouble on my line (that after she'd put me on hold -- to horrible music -- to check with Repair) and although she thought it would be taken care of soon if it was still out by 3 o'clock I should go to a neighbor's house and call 611.

So I did that.  From the next-door neighbors' house, not wanting to impose again on the across-the-street neighbors.  And after a painful traversal of Repair's particularly lame "menus" was informed that the problem was that the DSL installation that was being performed had knocked the line out but everything would be fixed by 7 p.m.  "The DSL installation?  The one I was talking to the DSL people about when the line went out?  The one they think can't be expedited and won't happen until the 21st?"  "Oh, it'll be done by tomorrow." (borderline smugly).   "Really?"  "Really."  "Neat!  Almost worth losing a few hours of phone service for.  And you're sure I'll be back on the air by 7?"  "7 to 7:30".   And I had to give them the neighbor's phone number as a "contact number" (and also as a confirmation number) in case anything went wrong, so I thought that was pretty promising.

Silly me.

Not  knowing what was forthcoming, though, I let them put me through to the DSL shop when the offer was made to do so, because I thought I ought to let them know that Repair thought I had been expedited, no matter what they thought.  After around 3/4 of an hour (starting, by pleasant coincidence, with the same guy I'd first spoken to yesterday and ending with his supervisor) I had a promise that if Repair was wrong, as she still thought they were, she'd do her best to get  me expedited for a Friday the 18th activation, and another promise that she'd call me at 3 tomorrow to let me know how it came out (and even, in response to my request, her direct line number, which tackily enough isn't an 800 number, so if my phone wasn't repaired I could get through to her), and I went back to my place to wait for 7:30 and/or a dialtone, whichever came  first.  I'd also, during the course of the conversation, made what I took to be a pretty good case that SBC had better be prepared to do something good to compensate me for/mollify me over what they'd put me through, since it'd already cost me enough time and energy that, if I hadn't retired, at what my normal consulting rates would be by now they'd "owe" me around 10 years worth of DSL at their normal rate.

Skip ahead to 9 p.m., 3/16, after having gone to the other-side next-door neighbors, to spread the impositions around fairly, to call Repair at 8:10, being kept on hold interminably for somebody who then said he'd have to bring somebody else in on the act (perhaps a supervisor) who then  put me on eternal hold after a minture of so's worth of explanation, which all took so long that the neighbor apologetically reclaimed the phone since it was time for her to put the kids to bed, then going back to the first next-door neighors.  Per Repair Supervisor, after insisting on being put through to a supervisor when I finally got through to a person at all, oversimplifying and only hitting the "high" spots:  (In response to my anguished "Why didn't you tell me you weren't going to be able to keep the 7 o'clock promise in a timely fashion, when there still was a chance for the appropriate tech from the other/nonRepair department to set things right [which I'd just  learned from her]?")  Not verbatim, but close: "There's no ticket/trouble report anymore, so we don't have a contact number for you."    And summary only: The ticket disappeared when a "Fielded Order" [from Services] was noticed, per Repair's procedures [it's fascinating that Services take precedence over Repairs, when you consider that if the line's in need of repair the new service is going to be hard to install, but that's current Procedure at TPC].  DSL must have failed to put Provisioning on the job but did put Maintenance on (despite their having told me that "the Maintenance Company" refused to expedite the 3/21 date) but Maintenance can't do their thing until Provisioning's done theirs, which apparently the DSL folks aren't aware of.

So Repair has a bug in their workflow, since they lost the ability (a/k/a the contact number they'd insisted on my furnishing) to tell me they couldn't keep their promise to have me back on  the air by 7-7:30 p.m. for the very reason that had taken me off the air: that the DSL work had been begun [even though, n.b., "SBCDSL" didn't know it]... but by another department [which either also has a bug in its workflow or just happened to screw up in my particular case].  AND  NOWHERE DOES IT SAY THAT DSL INSTALLATION MIGHT EVEN TAKE MY PHONE  "OFF THE AIR" FOR A SINGLE MINUTE, MUCH LESS ALMOST AN ENTIRE DAY.

And of course my demand for an activated cellphone to be delivered to me immediately in case I  needed to call 911 between then and whenever it was tomorrow that I had a dialtone again (and, allegedly, DSL) was met with "We never do that." (borderline shirty)  To which I replied that if anything did happen, SBC had better hope it was fatal, because it'd be a fabulous lawsuit if I did survive.  (She did, at the end of the conversation, loosen up enough to suggest that I call Customer Service tomorrow and they'd probably offer me compensation well beyond a couple of days' prorated service charges.)

So there we are.  There must be a moral somewhere, but if so it'll be added later.

End of Round 1

It's now the following Mon. nite/Tues. morn.  No moral has yet emerged, other than the possibility the TPC remains TPC no matter what it changes its d.b.a. initials to.  But there have been several more subadventures since I did the preceding and I'm getting so drained by the whole "experience" that I'd better record 'em before I forget 'em.

On Thurs., the phone did come back up at 11 a.m.  And the modem came on.  And I bulled my way through to 2nd-tier Tech Support again even tho the answerrobot said "Hmmmm.  I don't  find that DSL number" to begin with.  Even got a good guy at the other end of the line, who not only handheld me through the sloppily documented process to get the modem to believe who I was but even managed to get me "registered" to the satisfaction of SBCYahoo himself (which I couldn't have done on my own because I was still stuck in some other computer as not to be activated until the 21st), if not to the satisfaction of the voicebot over the next several days.  The high lowlight of the afternoon was when the DSL supervisor I'd spoken to the day before who'd promised she'd try to get my activation expedited to Fri. (it was still down for the following Mon. in their "books")  did keep her promise to give me a call ... and wouldn't believe me when I said I'd been activated for several hours.

Late on Thurs. afternoon, I realized I wasn't getting anything like the download speeds I expected, wasted an  hour or two tromping thru the Yahoo "on-line documentation" jungle (and since this is just about me and TPC I won't expose my body parts to the wear and tear of chronicling how bad Yahoo is as an ISP -- tho I suspect the silly kids who started it must have brought in an AOL "suit" to be their system architect when they decided they needed to pretend to be an ISP) until I finally found "speedtest".  Well, on the righthand side of the results screen there's a box that shows how well I'd done on a 2.5meg download ("typical mp3 file size") vs. the presumed "about 9 minutes" for a 56kb dialup modem, and sure enough I'd scored 8 min. 40 secs.  I.e., the  download speed was low by a decimal and a binary order of magnitude.  At least the upload rate wasn't down at dialup modem rates.  That time.  Not that it was up at claimed DSL rates either, of course.

So I tried to get my buddy from earlier, who'd gotten me registered and talked me thru magicking the modem -- who'd also sent me netmail from his work account so  we could stay in touch -- to help, but it was late enough by then that it wasn't until Friday that he e-told me all he could do  was to recommend a different speedtester because he had his doubts about Yahoo's and when I e-reported back that it had indeed turned in ~75kbps (MINIMUM for DSL advertized to be  1.2Mbps) basically e-said he try to get back to me by phone later, which I thought at least implied that he'd get back to me over the 'Net if he couldn't phone.  Then on Sat., when I decided he must be off for the weekend or at least wasn't getting back to me via 'Net or phone, I did battle with the voicebot again, got through to another good 2T TS guy, who caused the line to be checked, told me it was indeed bad, and gave me a "confirm number" and an 800 number to call  "tomorrow" if I hadn't heard from them by a reasonable time.  So I did that.  And got still another good guy who apologetically said that since it was Sunday it wasn't going to get taken care of "today" but would be taken care of "tomorrow".  He also was the first person to take my (completely true) statement that I could hear what sounded like an oldfashioned cheap television set's "15KC horizontal transformer whine" at the modem even though I'd been assured by an old M.I.T. friend who's  hardware-savvy that there wasn't a transformer in the modem.  "Bad lines'll do that" the Sunday TS guy said.

Now, what's particularly galling is that after screwing up the installation to begin with in a fashion that left me without phone service for 20 hours last Weds.-Thurs. [Repair having said it was the DSL dweebs' fault for sending Maintenance before they'd sent Provisioning, remember, but Repair couldn't do anything about it because there was a "Fielded Order" in place ... which even apparently got my trouble ticket automatically deleted so Repair couldn't even tell me what was going on via my next-door neighbor's phone], and finally telling me on Sat. that the line was indeed bad and it'd either be fixed the next day and I'd be called or I could call a given number and tell them my confirm number and find out what was going on if I got tired of waiting to hear,  and when I did that being assured it'd be fixed ''tomorrow' -- i.e., Mon. -- what do you suppose TPC did to me next?  Yup, what happened on Mon. when I woke up was that there was a message on my machine from a TPC voicerobot that was basically an "aren't we wonderful,  we've started processing your problem" sort of message, complete with an incorrect trouble ticket number -- one of the letters was wrong (I'd had the Sat. TS guy repeat it for me a couple of  times before he finally used "P for Paul", but the voicebot said E) -- and ending with "if you  have any questions you can call 1 ... BEEPBEEP"!!!

Apparently The Phone Company doesn't know there are answering machines that only take fixedlength, not all that long messages.  Or doesn't know how to deal with them, at any rate.

Naturally, that led to another call, since I assumed I already knew what the number voicebot was going to say before it got cut off.  And that led to "Jennifer", who was pleasant enough but who was convinced the problem was probably not on the line so had me disconnect various of the other  phones around the house, tsktsked over the fact that I had splitterthingies [hey, I don't "do" hardware; nor do I happen to know the right name for the bloody widgets] for multiple phonelines going into the phoneline side of most of the "filters" I'd had to put in on all the phone jacks (which I don't think can possibly be the problem since there's essentially only one "phone" behind each of the multisplitterthingies, and with one exception none of the phones even has its ringer turned on, ever), assured me my venerable dialup phone that has a nice loud ringer which I can easily disable overnite by just pulling out the linecord into it was the problem (but when I ran "speedtest" with it disconnected I actually got a lower speeed than I had gotten right before I called her), and  basically said no, there was no way the promise to get it worked on today could be kept.  But she did offer, repeatedly, to send a tech over to check my inside wiring ... which would, of course, incur a charge if it was something not covered by the never adequately explained  "LinePro" [or whatever it's called; "WirePro" probably] extortion money I've been paying for years.

I informed her that I'd return the modem and cancel the DSL service before I'd incur any further charges.  And I mean it.

So we'll see what the morrow brings.

And what a good thing I'm just dealing with direct TPC messes, since I filled in most of the time on Sat.-Mon. nite trying to be able to access LAFN, my good old dialup ISP which I intend to keep my account on even if I don't cancel out the DSL nonsense, over the 'Net/via the DSL modem in addition to by dialup, even tho I can of course use dialup alongside the DSL modem, but that  not only takes a fair amount of time to get connected but it also busies out the phone line while I'm doing it.  Finally did work it out.  Too long and stupid a story to go into in detail, but the solution was to download the newest version of Eudora and install it twice, since unlike the  version I'd been running for years it did have the feature that would let me use LAFN over the 'Net (actually, I could always download from it, it's just that I couldn't sent mail out) but its "documentation" of "personalities" was so dreadful that rather than just have one instance of it to deal with both LAFN and the new sbcglobal account that comes with the DSL service and needs to be looked at occasionally since the SBC/Yahoo idiots use my address there when they have new idiocies to impart to me, it was easier to have an instance of it for each account.  Lost track of how many hours -- and netmail exchanges with LAFN's sysadmin -- that took me to arrive at.

[B/t/w, you might wonder why I didn't just use "Thunderbird" for the new account rather than try to use Eudora "personalities" and wind up using new-dora and new-dora2.  The details would violate my oath not to bring the SBC/Yahoo squishware dimension into this, but in short it's because Thunderbird and Yahoo can't agree on how/how often to "authenticate" and even if I ever get thru to somebody at Yahoo who can understand the problem and even if he or she is willing to try to get Them to fix the problem, it'll take some time for things to be straightened out.]

End of Round 2

Well, OK, third time lucky.  On Tues. around 11 a.m. there was a knock on my door.  It was an SBC guy.  I didn't expect an SBC guy at my door, of course, after my conversation with Jennifer the day before, but he said he was just there to check the line from the outside, so I told him to pray continue.  Line's clean, he said a little while later.  [I wouldn't have mentioned that 3 TS people had told me the line was bad even if I'd thought of it at the time.]  You'll get a call in a few minutes about what next.  And wonder of wonders I did get a call in a few minutes, and it even led to the resolution of the linespeed problem.  Embarrassingly enough, said resolution was reached after "Nick" got me to humor him and plug the modem directly into the phone jack, forget the "filter".   Initially, I'd said, "but it doesn't fit in the phone jack", with the Ethernet cable that connects the modem to the computer and its larger connectors in mind, and he'd observed that it really did fit, it was the other cable that didn't fit in the wall.  Sigh.  Clearly, I'd still had the Ethernet cable in mind when I'd plugged into the "filter" in the first place and so when the jack for the modem was set in white plastic while the jack for the conventional phone next to it was set in black plastic, the black one had looked bigger and I'd taken the modem cord, which I'd misassumed had a bigger connector, and put it in the wrong jack because I'd assumed it was the larger one.  Argh.   (Yeah, the jacks are labelled.  It's just that I was already well and truly worn out by the 4-5 days I'd already been in DSL Hell and clearly I'd neglected to R TFLs.  Sure, it doesn't excuse; but it does explain.)

But still, it shouldn't have taken from Friday to Tuesday to get to that point, there shouldn't have been 3 unkept "tomorrow" promises, getting thru to Tech Support via the 877SBCDSL5 voicbot each time shouldn't have been such a horrorshow, the message on the answering machine Mon. morn shouldn't have been from a voicebot in the first place, shouldn't have been a start of cycle message in the zeroth place, and should have made damn sure it included the necessary (non-877SBCDSL5) phone number in the nth place.  For that matter, it's astonishing that plugging directly into the jack isn't at the top of the standard checklist everybody in Tech Support should be working from after the obvious initial steps have been taken; as it played out, it was only mentioned by the fifth TS person I'd been in touch with about the problem.  So fine, ultimately it turned that metaphorically I'd shot myself in the foot, but the metaphorical 911 call had taken 5 days to send the paramedic to treat the wound, and that's not right.

It is, however, all.  For this journal, anyway.  And I intend to continue to resist the temptation to record the lunacies I'm encountering with what amounts to Yahoo's Tech Support now that I'm in a position to have to sort out their dreadful software's inadequacies, errors, bugs, deviations from the standards, etc., etc.

The only reason why I don't conclude with "Ahhhh, it'll all be over in a couple of weeks, when I return the modem to Best Buy after having told SBC to cancel before I'm stuck for a year" is that I still haven't decided whether or not to exercise that option.  After all, I've already invested so much time and energy in the whole stupid mess that I just might feel I need to protect the investment, however much Their insistence on having Their serfs answer phones with "How may I offer you excellent service today?" makes me want to scream.

Oh, the moral.  Hmmm.  How about

Not only does The Phone Company remain The Phone Company no matter what initials it's doing business as when it comes to hardware, but when it throws in for the software side with an outfit whose founders apparently managed to avoid being thrown out by "the suits" -- unlike Bob at 3Com and Len at cisco -- after they got big enough to feel they had to bring in "the suits", it seems to have been at the price of having brought in some "suits" from AOL, who were too incompetent to know how to knife the founders in the back ... and far too incompetent to know how to build a real ISP, The Phone Company is even more The Phone Company than ever.

Yeah, takes some parsing but sounds about right....

End of Round 3,
 
and of the journal, but not, sadly, of the Adventure, since the main reason for springing for DSL (other than to splurge some money on myself because I'm not all that fond of my heirs [a precept imparted to me by the Hotel Manager of the QE2 during the first of our two lengthy informal conversations back in January, somewhere in the Pacific]) was to facilitate playing around with "Linux", and that's going to require getting Linux configured for the modem and that's going to require getting SBC/Yahoo to explain what the hell their modem [which is alleged to be a "one-port router" that I could turn into a "bridge" if I want to, but that'd mean I'd broken down and gotten a multiport router so as to be able to hook my backup system in as well] is actually doing and how I make it do what I/Linux want it to do, if I do decide to stay in Their clutches for the year....

dogged cheers [= barks], map