Telecommunications companies used to provide reliable telephone service and jobs for people in our communities. Our neighbours who worked for the telephone company were, on the whole, capable and understanding and would answer queries in a friendly and knowledgeable way. This was also back when Sunday night radio featured Jack Benny and Fred Allen. Those comics are just as dead as customer service is today. There are no longer helpful, service-oriented employees at any telecommunications company. They have been replaced with inexpensive and incompetent outsourced call centres and technical staff who are not allowed to talk to customers.
A good example of this was the other day when the wife and I were heading out for lunch in different directions. We were both being picked up by separate friends who had told us they would call when they arrive at our building. There was no point in either coming up to our 15th floor suite. We would come down when our respective driver arrived.
Like a couple dummies, we sat there, ready to go, in our suite from about 11:30 am until close to 1 pm, waiting for the calls. Neither of us used the telephone in this time as we did not want our drivers to get passed to voice mail. Finally, the wife said that something must be wrong and called the person with whom she was supposed to have lunch.
It was then that she found out that the woman had arrived on time, called and when she got voice mail instead of my wife or I, she waited for a while and then reluctantly went back home. When my wife called, the gal was eating her lunch, at home alone.
None of this made sense to the wife. She checked the voice mail and could not get into it because as soon as she dialled *98 to reach the voice mail, a voice demanded a password. Our code for accessing the voice mail was not accepted. She was told it was the wrong password and she should try again.
What we soon found out was that our telephone had not been working when the two people came to the building. As our entry system works through our telephone—which was not working at the time—both left lengthy messages on our voice mail to express their concern that we were not there. As the person picking me up had already driven for more than an hour and a half to get to our place, he went off and found a place for a hamburger while waiting for me to call him on his cell phone.
To add insult to injury, the incompetent telecommunications company responsible for our telephone and voice mail not only had our telephone out of commission in that time but the voice mails that were left never went to a voice mail server for us. Our messages went to Never-Never Land.
It was with great difficulty that I contained my annoyance when talking to technical support for the telecommunications company. After considerable difficulty trying to explain what was wrong, I was blithely informed that our telephone service had been interrupted to allow for an upgrade and I had to re-initiate the voice mail. There was a very hollow apology given for disrupting our telephone service for so long at such an inappropriate time of day, losing our messages and putting us to the trouble of resetting our voice mail.
What was less than funny was that we got an e-mail from the company two days later telling us how to reset our voice mail when it was upgraded.
Luckily our two appointments could be caught up and the inconvenience was not the stuff of lawsuits. It is just one more example of really stupid, uncaring service by a telecommunications company. What the company considers an upgrade is a faster connection to voice mail that uses a voice with what sounds to me like a vaguely Hessian accent that demands information from you. This is enough to send us back to using answering machines. They are friendlier and do not send your messages into the ether where they are never heard again.
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