SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT AGAIN


Over the years, the telephone service provided by the Verizon Corporation was interrupted frequently. In one case, over the Memorial Day holiday of this year, service went out on a Sunday and we were told, according to the recorded announcement, that it would not be restored until Wednesday. I found this, as an old telephone man, to be outrageous. As it turned out, the service was restored on Tuesday, and the Verizon Corporation gave us a credit for the lost time.
I am not particularly interested in getting credit for service that is not delivered, but I do wish to have continuous service that is uninterrupted by frequent outages.
And so it was that in May, I wrote a letter to the chairman of the Verizon Corporation, whose name is Ivan Seidenberg. I told the chairman that the trouble with our outages traced to a junction box nearly a half mile from our home. The junction box, according to technicians who had been at the house, was overloaded and when telephone workmen found need to enter it, they often left several dozen or more homes without service. My letter was reasonably respectful but I pointed out to the Chairman that in the old Bell System, there was a spirit of service. It would have been unconscionable in those days to leave customers without service for as much as four days over an important holiday.
The letter to the chairman, of course, was in May and here it was now approaching the middle of July. I had heard nothing from them and I was prepared to write in another letter. Suddenly someone on the Chairman’s staff discovered my letter and set out to make things right. This gentleman not only offered to fix our problem, but he offered to give us a fiber optic cable which would not have anything to do with the overloaded junction box. In truth, I thought that this person was making a promise that he could not keep.
That was, I believe, on a Tuesday and on Thursday, July 9th, two technicians showed up and started to work. They were very polite people and told us that we would be without service for four hours, but in the end we would have a fiber optic cable to service our phone. That is exactly what happened.
After they left, one way or another, one of our phones had no dial tone and could not be used. When that was reported, within hours a technician showed up with a tool that put our phone back in service. The fact that the technician was named Dennis Mooney, a first-generation American-Irishman, could not hurt in this transaction.
This essay is an attempt to set the record straight in that in my most recent set of essays, there was one that was critical of the Verizon Corporation. Perhaps it was the letter to the chairman of Verizon that turned the trick. But I want to set the record straight, that we now have fiber optic service and we are greatly pleased. I have not told my neighbors about my letter to the chairman. I intend to hold that close to my vest to see if the good service lasts for a while. But when push came to shove, it was the letter to the chairman that produced the grand result, for which we are grateful.
It seemed to me that recording the results of the latter day visits by the Verizon Corporation would tend to set this matter straight. I am delighted to alter the record so that perhaps people may think a bit more kindly of the Verizon Corporation than they would have after reading my recent essay on the subject.
E. E. CARR
July 19, 2009
Essay 397
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Kevin’s commentary: Okay, well this is a good piece of news. Of course the earlier essay to which this one refers can be found here. Those who were not paying attention might instead think that the other essay went by the same title, Setting the Record Straight (1.0) which was also very good.
The fact remains that for a longtime employee of AT&T, Pop’s decision of service providers (if there was a decision involved) seems rather traitorous. I realize that there was an act of some sort which transferred his service to Verizon, but I wonder if it would be possible to switch back to AT&T nowadays? Or perhaps that’s too much work for no real reason, especially if he has fiber optic cable now. Either way I’m happy things worked out.

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