How the phone company wasted another $20

Wasted!

This is another story illustrating why my so-called high-speed ISP - run by a certain phone company in the Midwest - gets almost universally bad reviews. (Not like there's any alternative, because the only other high-speed ISP in this part of town is the cable company, and I don't think there's any way they can even get a cable into my apartment.)

I recently ditched my landline because the phone company wouldn't control the harassing calls from banks demanding money from people I don't even know. And now, all week, I've had trouble with my Internet. It came to a head today when it went down altogether for hours.

I dreaded calling the phone company, because if they thought the problem was at my end, I'd be offline for the next week. It takes them that long for them to come out and fix any problem. There's no laws, ya know.

But I called 'em. The recording said I'd be on hold for 6 to 10 minutes. Instead I was on hold for a half-hour. Then the support technician gave me some steps to fix the problem - after he spent many minutes hunting down my account information, which the phone company had carelessly misfiled. His instructions worked - until I got off the phone. Then my Internet went down again.

Then I had to call them again. This time, it took another 45 minutes for a different guy to give me different instructions.

Our local phone company is so primitive that during both of these calls, I kept hearing other calls to their call center in the background. It's sort of like what my landline was like in the months before I got rid of it: Whenever I talked on the phone, I'd hear other conversations. Gee, I didn't know I had a party line!

I guess that's what we can expect from a phone company that was once caught conspiring with major corporations to spy on dissidents for "communist" activities.

The instructions from the second guy seem to have worked, but who knows for how long?

Meanwhile, spending 80 minutes talking to these support personnel cost me $20. One drawback to switching to cell phone is that every call is now a toll call.

The phone company squandered $20 of my cell phone minutes fixing an Internet problem that was at their end. All I had to do here to fix it was turn the modem off and back on while they were working. The techs did all the work, so the problem was obviously at the phone company's end, not mine. Yet who's paying? On the bright side, my $20 won't be going to this phone company, since I use a different provider for cell phone.

Honestly, isn't it time for regulators to lower the boom? I thought phone and other utilities underwent precious little regulation 20 years ago, but now there's almost none.