Phone-Company-Andrew Rides Again

(And redeems himself a little bit.)

It snowed again this weekend. I'm not sure if that's why, when I got home on Saturday evening, my entire phone line was dead, but it could be. I tried to call the repair hotline for my phone company, but for some reason my cell phone wouldn't support this call and kept routing me to various 411 centres. Who tried to route me to the number but only managed to put me through to other 411 centres. No one has been able to offer me an explanation for this.

Also, I had some questions to ask my dad about the phone account here, but he doesn't live in this country, and my cell phone doesn't call internationally. It receives international calls, though. (At least, usually it does.) So I called my brother and asked him to call my father and ask him to call me. On my cell phone. Because my landline wasn't working. (Thus email was right out, too.) This sort of thing makes me feel situationally claustrophobic. Situational claustrophobia makes me freak out a little. Or sometimes a lot. I spent most of this weekend trying not to freak out, with only minimal success.

My dad called and we chatted and he tried to report the fault on our line via his own internet connexion. He got a message back saying, "The number you are reporting is part of an outage." (Oh. Really.) "The estimated restoration time for this outage is 3/28/2007, 11.00 pm."

Wednesday? Are you kidding me? It seems to me that at that point, some sort of refund should be issued. But I had an alternative course of action. I noticed that Phone-Company-Andrew had a cell phone number on the business card he had given to me so, even though it was Sunday afternoon and I don't really know him, I called it. He was shocked to hear the estimated restoration time for my outage. Shocked and a little angry as it happens. My phone was up and running again by 10.30 this morning. Even though, as it turns out, Phone-Company-Andrew was on vacation.

I had a nasty-customer story to tell you instead. But a good-customer story is probably better.

All this is also to explain partially why you haven't seen me blabbing in the blogosphere for a while.