It’s almost a a phone Point of Entry, but it seems to have only the house connection. There’s no service connection from the phone company. Of course, that tech might be there to install service.
We all know Verizon is evil; however, in the boonies, Verizon can’t even be assed to provide its bad service there, they’ve sold off a lot their rural service to small hopeless carriers, like Frontier. These companies are too small to be evil like Verizon, they are just really incompetent, or at least don’t provide a lot of modern services (forget fios, or any kind of high speed internet). Why is this a New Yorker comic? For all those with weekend homes in Vermont, to remind them that the bad service they’re getting is not because the phone company is evil, like back home, but just incompetent. Don’t assume malice where incompetence will do, and here in rural VT, it will; back home, yeah, they’re evil. (I’m always surprised when I visit VT how few native Vermonters I meet, and how many displaced New Yorkers there are…)
Ah yes – Incompetents-R-Us has franchises all over, for every service. Our roofers last month came from there.
I didn’t know Frontier was a ‘small hopeless carrier’; they’re pretty big here in Florida (whether they’re ‘hopeless’ here, I’ve no idea.)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” This is the comic version of that.
“Telephone Man” was a top 20 hit in 1977. What a time to be alive.
Corporate is evil, the folks in the field are lousy at what they do for incompetence, cost-cutting, loss of motivation, or whatever.
Even here in the big city, the telco and cable companies have a good number of contracts they flip the actual on-site work to. Not going to say those guys are incompetent, but because those telcos/cable companies are monopolies with no significant competition, there is no need to provide good service. Even technically competent service can turn a customer off if conducted with seeming indifference and lack of communication.
Without disagreeing with anyone above (especially about Vz being evil), I have almost always found the field folks to be great: it’s the phone and of course corporate who are eejits.
The one exception would be whoever wired our home phone by the NID, which looked like it was done by a four-year-old on drugs. Fortunately it stopped working and the guy they sent took one look at it, shook his head, and basically redid the whole thing. Now it’s a thing of beauty, one of the stops on the house tour (OK, not really, but for a sufficiently geeky visitor, it would be).
And for some reason I’m reminded of the joke about the young lady who tells her friend that she has a date with a cable installer that evening: “He’s picking me up sometime between four and eight.”
When renovating my first FL home, lots of wires ran nowhere, so before the painters started, we went around to see which wires could come down ’cause they weren’t connected to anything.
ONE WIRE – my internet connection – WAS THE ONLY WIRE THAT SHOULD *NOT* BE CUT. I showed them which it was.
AND you know what happened . . . that was the first wire to be cut. Brighthouse (or whatever it was at the time – Time-Warner, Spectrum, who knows) sent someone out IMMEDIATELY and not only did he fix the cable issue, turns out he knew quite a bit about the history of the area so we had a nice conversation.
After many service calls, a competent technician determined the problem on our land line was with the connection to the house; that was owned by a different telephone company, so that company had to send someone out (when I wasn’t there, out of town for several days) to work outside. But they trampled a lot of hostas and broke the gutter downspout, and a heavy rain dumped right into my basement before I got home. I pestered both phone companies until mine finally paid for the basement cleanup. They did manage to fix the phone connection, though.
(Not that I was any good at phone wiring; in the first house I owned there were phone wires everywhere; previous owners had apparently run a phone bank. So I was cleaning it up and carefully identified the live wires not to cut, and the other dead wires to cut and discard. And then of course first thing I cut the live wires. And while I was repairing them somebody called us and I got jolted with whatever the voltage to ring the phone is.)
The illustration looks a lot like the box on the side of my house, except there’s no gutter near it for them to break (the service in would be the cable going up, and then out of the drawing across to a telephone pole; wires through the wall into the house)..
“. . . (the service in would be the cable going up, and then out of the drawing across to a telephone pole; wires through the wall into the house).
Everything here is underground, for which I am grateful.
This discussion reminds me why we dropped our landline.
A long time ago I heard this line from a standup comic: “I just bought a car. It was a Southwest Bell courtesy car. Never been used.”
Well, *I* thought it was funny.
That last comment reminds me of this from long back in my quotes file:
I had phone service from Continental Telephone. (Motto:
“You’ll Envy the Dead.”) The community next door had GTE.
(Motto: “You’ll Envy Continental Telephone Customers.”)
– M. Van Pelt
Bell Canada service stories (which are actually about the Internet service I had with them. Phone service has been competent, if overpriced).
1. We had ADSL in our apartment. I had a genuinely unlimited plan. No cap, no overage charges on data. This was grandfathered in because they latter began to cap everything and charge for going over the cap. The speed was 3Mbps, which was pretty fast when I got it, but kept falling behind the norm as the years passed.
At one point, I called to ask about a promotional offer I had seen advertised. I asked if taking advantage of that offer, which would have seen an increase in speed (7Mbps!) would mean I meant my genuinely unlimited service and would have a cap. I was told I would lose the unlimited and have a cap. So far so good. I was then told that if I committed to a year-long contract on my current plan (I was on month-to-month at the time), I could receive a discount of $10/month. I asked if this affected my unlimited data. I was told “No.”
A month after agreeing to the contract, I got the bill. It showed the charge and then a $30 data overage fee. Needless to say, I was quite upset. I called service and told them I had agreed to the contract but that I was told there would be no data cap and I should not charged an overage fee. The young man, located in a Philippines data centre, then proceeds to explain to me what the data overage charge is for, as if I didn’t already tell him what happened. At this point, I ask for a supervisor as that’s how you get someone who is actually located in Canada and not reading a script.
I tell her my story and say I want my old plan back. She tells me I can’t have it, doesn’t exist anymore. Then she says that for $25 they offer data overage “insurance” so that no matter how much you go over the cap, you are only charged $25. I tell her I’m not interested in paying anything more than I was before. She says that she can put this on the account and, for the next year, the duration of the contract, she can see I get a credit of $25/month to offset that cost. I agree to this as it seems the best I’ll get.
Next month, I get a bill. Still has a charge for data overage of $30 and no credit.
I call back and immediately ask for supervisor as I see no point in wasting time with a flunky.
I tell her what has happened (a different her from the first). She says she sees the notes of the conversation and that the insurance and credit are not active on the account and that she will do this herself and I will have no further problems. I’m dubious, but hang up and wait for my next bill.
The next month, the bill comes. It has the overage “insurance” on it and two credits for $25. At this point, I decided that I had spent enough time on the phone trying to fix their lies. I collected the credit of $50 per month for the remainder of the contract, then switched to a different Internet provider.
Bell Canada story 2:
When we moved to a new place, we moved our Internet service. We still had ADSL, now with a company called TekSavvy (I’d recommend to anyone in Canada). A much better company, a fairer price, better service, truly unlimited plans. All was fine. Except for the final “mile”.
TekSavvy owns all their own Internet stuff except for the final-leg infrastructure. Due to competition regulations, Bell Canada has to allow them into their central office (actually the various exchanges located around the city) to connect their Internet to the Bell Canada copper (yes, the story is a little old) lines (yes, it was running over the landline telephone line that we had with Bell) that connected to my place.
ADSL technology is distance limited. It may have improved but the limit at the time was 5km. Over that distance, the signal diminishes and the speed gets lower. At the 5km, it’s essentially useless. Well, the SOBs at Bell would not allow TekSavvy to switch my connection from the one CO to one closer to my home. I guess they figured they had obliged them by allowing them into the CO. Nothing said they had to offer the closest CO. Well, this meant that I was about 5km from the CO and my connection was $%^t. Sub-dial up speed. This seemed very petty to me.
This was several years after story number 1 and TekSavvy was now offering cable Internet access in my area as well. So, we switched to that and things improved dramatically.
Now, the cable infrastructure “last mile” is owned by Rogers, so that has not been without problems as well.
Bell Canada story 3:
Bell Canada was rewiring our building with fibre, replacing all the copper lines. In addition to phone service, they also offer all the high-speed TV and Internet stuff that telcos do, so they needed the infrastructure to support that. So, this goes on for some time in the building and they eventually get to our unit. It didn’t take them that long to do the work. Then they left.
Then our phone didn’t work (yes, we still have a landline and it is still with Bell).
We called (mobile phones, don’t you know) the maintenance manager and he sent them back the next day and they fixed whatever they had broken and the phone worked.
These were not contractors either, these were genuine Bell employees.
So yeah, I do not like the phone company.
Well, since we’ve wandered into telecom stories: In 2001 I was running engineering at a very small consulting firm, run out of a townhouse (not the owner’s house: that was actually two townhouses away). We had horrible cable connectivity for download, with upload via dialup. (And the upload link would drop constantly–I wound up writing a VERY ugly Perl script to test it once per minute and, if down, fake the http transaction to log us back on.)
We aspired to an upgrade, to DSL. I called Verizon, who swore it was not available. A couple of weeks later, I got a call from a sales rep from Steel City Telecom, offering DSL. “Sure, we’d love it”, I replied, “but Verizon tells me there’s no DSLAM in the CO”.
“Sure there is: it’s just not THEIR DSLAM”, he replied. A week later we had DSL. Note that Verizon didn’t have our cable hookup, so this was pure ignorance (at best), flat-out lying (more likely IMHO). I already knew Verizon was evil; this was just one more nail in the coffin.
More recently, while we still had Verizon copper to the house, they’d call every week and try to convince us to move to FiOS. Of course they want us to move: it’s not regulated as much, so they can screw with FiOS customers more. They would always say, “You’ll get better reliability!” and I’d reply, “So you’re threatening to deliberately degrade my copper, which has been 100% reliable for 20+ years?” That always ended the conversation, after a stunned silence.
****ers need to lose their monopoly. Ma Bell was never this deliberately evil, just neglectful/monolithic/uncaring.
“Ma Bell was never this deliberately evil”
Do you remember acoustic couplers? Ma Bell wouldn’t let anyone else’s equipment touch their phone lines, and Ma Bell’s modems were horrendously expensive. (Not to mention that you couldn’t own your own phone and had to pay monthly rental on it.)
“Ma Bell was never this deliberately evil, just neglectful/monolithic/uncaring.”
‘She’ didn’t have to be, already having NO competition.
billytheskink – It was “Telephone Line” by Electric Light Orchestra in 1977, not “Telephone Man.”
Telephone Line
Maybe the confusion is with “Witchita Lineman.” A big hit in 1968 for Glen Campbell.
Apparently, Telephone Man and Telephone Line we’re both released in 1977, not sure if they both made it to the top 20.
That’s why I don’t use a land line.
AT&T with their corporate culture of hostility towards their customers. The only possible response that is both proper and appropriate is to not be their customer.
I just looked up Telephone Man. It was by Meri Wilson, and it made it up to number 18 in 1977. It was a sort of double entendre novelty song. Sorry to have incorrectly corrected you, billytheskink.
We have not been happy with our cable TV service or their Internet service in decades. When FIOS first came out we went to find about it. Problem was that we would be required to switch our telephone service from copper wire to FIOS. So we still have the cable service and the copper wire service. Other than when we inquired about FIOS the only time they tried to switch us over was when we had trouble with the lines – our lines run in the back of the houses on the property line over the fences and the lines run rather low so animals like to snack on them – was when we called due to a problem with the line.
But if you want to hear about not wonderful cable service, let me know.
When I started reading the comments and electric companies were being talked of –
As mentioned above our utility lines run on the back property line. We have, however, a second set of utility lines in front of the house which ours splits off from about 2-3 houses north of us. The lines in the normal place – along the roadway – seem to exist to bring the electricity from one point to another and only directly serves the one house across the street from us (house on either side of him face the side streets and get their electricity from lines along same) and the street lights. There is a transformer on the street lines where our lines split off to the back lines. It blows – a lot.
Last week on the 19th I was woken at 7:30 am when I heard an explosion. I rolled over looked at the clock and knew that the transformer had blown – again. I called the electric co and spoke with a computer giving the info. I then called back and using the hffffur system got to a live person to whom I explained that I had called and left the official notice on the computer, but I could save them time and tell them what was wrong and that the transformer blew again and told him about where it was on the street. I did not wake Robert as he would panic. By 10:30 the electricity was back.
Sunday evening (technically early Monday am) at 1:30 am I again heard the transformer blow. Robert started to panic and I calmed him down and then called the electric company – computer could not for some reason file the complaint and it transferred me to a live person. I explained and also told him that it was the second time in a week this had happened. He looks up the records and says to me “Why, this is the second time in a week this happened.” I agree with him. He tells me that no one else has called – I bit my tongue and did not say “I guess they are all asleep”. I again explain where the transformer is. We have an abbreviated version of our late night snack as we cannot make my oatmeal and his grits as the stove is electric and go upstairs to bed. (We have good battery run lamps to use.) As we get into bed I put my old Blackberry next to the bed on the logic that I can check the time on it and not waste the battery in my current phone. I offer Robert my old Palm phone, he says that it is a good idea and goes and gets one of his old cell phones to use. We normally don’t go to sleep for another couple of hours and I need the TV on to go to sleep. I pick up the Blackberry and start playing a game on it. He finds this a good idea and finds a recording of the play “Applause” and starts it playing – concerned the battery might run out and it will not play all the way through. ( I keep my old cell phones charged as I use them for other purposes – and the Palm can still call 911 if needed and is on a different company than either of our current phones – Blackberry had to be replaced when the phone in it died so it is mostly used for games and as a quick reference to what day it is.) We hear the trucks come and see its lights through the curtains. They work for about 20 minutes and then figure out (as I told the employee on the phone) that the problem is up the street. They had it fixed by the end of “Applause”.
But why the heck does this transformer blow multiple times a year?
@Meryl, presumably the transformer is blowing because it’s getting too hot. That could be because it’s under-rated for the actual current used on your circuit, because of phasing problems if its a specific type of transformer, or various other reasons.
It could also be because of the environment. For instance, if there’s a tree limb above it and water drips on it, the water could get in via bad seals and contaminate the insulating/cooling oil, lowering its dielectric strength and leading to overheating. For that matter, a squirrel could be chewing on the bushings.
Are they replacing the can, or just replacing blown fuses each time? (Yes, poletop transformers typically have a fused cutout.) If it’s a common problem, you can almost certainly get it sorted by reporting it to your state’s version of the Public Service Commission, the state agency that regulates utility. PSC is New York’s name. In Massachusetts it’s the Department of Public Utilities, in Rhode Island the Public Utilities Commission. (Can you tell which 3 states my employer is an electric company in?)
carlfink – Thank you. We have lived in this house for 31 years – for 31 years we have had this problem. The electric co (on Long Island and I am guessing it is not the one you work for) is in the middle of working on their system so it will not go down as easily or often when there are storms and husband thinks that in addition to putting in thicker poles they are upgrading their transformers also (I don’t remember hearing or reading same.)
I am guessing that something over it or animal is more likely as it tends to happen at times of day when there is probably less electricity being used as when I call I am thinking that everyone else is away at work or asleep as it the wee hours of the morning.
I will keep your suggestion in mind though.
@MerylA: I work for National Grid, successor to the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO) as well as Niagara Mohawk, Brooklyn Union Gas, etc. You and I (also on Long Island) are served by the Long Island Power Authority, a government agency. These days they hide behind the company they contract to operate the system, Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG). They required us to brand all our equipment as “LIPA” and the bills were in LIPA’s name. They require PSEG to brand equipment with their own name and bill in their own name.
carlfink – Thank you. I know that LIPA is the cover name. National Grid where we are is the name on our billing on same. Nice to know a fellow LIer is on here.
Comics I Don't Understand 
That you don’t understand this is proof you are not a Californian who has to deal with PG&E.
I think that’s phone service rather than electric. It looks like the outside boxes for phones, and that’s a clip-on phone hanging from his belt.
Not that that explains the joke, but maybe it’ll help others.
CWAA
When it come to incompetence, I’d say it has to be some telcom/cable company. They combine the qualities of lazy and stupid.
Here’s one song about a lady that appreciated the telephone man. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOaUoMC6VZY Not visually arlo, but playfully implied by the lyrics.
None of these make sense:
https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/CWAA
It’s almost a a phone Point of Entry, but it seems to have only the house connection. There’s no service connection from the phone company. Of course, that tech might be there to install service.
We all know Verizon is evil; however, in the boonies, Verizon can’t even be assed to provide its bad service there, they’ve sold off a lot their rural service to small hopeless carriers, like Frontier. These companies are too small to be evil like Verizon, they are just really incompetent, or at least don’t provide a lot of modern services (forget fios, or any kind of high speed internet). Why is this a New Yorker comic? For all those with weekend homes in Vermont, to remind them that the bad service they’re getting is not because the phone company is evil, like back home, but just incompetent. Don’t assume malice where incompetence will do, and here in rural VT, it will; back home, yeah, they’re evil. (I’m always surprised when I visit VT how few native Vermonters I meet, and how many displaced New Yorkers there are…)
Ah yes – Incompetents-R-Us has franchises all over, for every service. Our roofers last month came from there.
I didn’t know Frontier was a ‘small hopeless carrier’; they’re pretty big here in Florida (whether they’re ‘hopeless’ here, I’ve no idea.)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” This is the comic version of that.
“Telephone Man” was a top 20 hit in 1977. What a time to be alive.
Corporate is evil, the folks in the field are lousy at what they do for incompetence, cost-cutting, loss of motivation, or whatever.
Even here in the big city, the telco and cable companies have a good number of contracts they flip the actual on-site work to. Not going to say those guys are incompetent, but because those telcos/cable companies are monopolies with no significant competition, there is no need to provide good service. Even technically competent service can turn a customer off if conducted with seeming indifference and lack of communication.
Without disagreeing with anyone above (especially about Vz being evil), I have almost always found the field folks to be great: it’s the phone and of course corporate who are eejits.
The one exception would be whoever wired our home phone by the NID, which looked like it was done by a four-year-old on drugs. Fortunately it stopped working and the guy they sent took one look at it, shook his head, and basically redid the whole thing. Now it’s a thing of beauty, one of the stops on the house tour (OK, not really, but for a sufficiently geeky visitor, it would be).
And for some reason I’m reminded of the joke about the young lady who tells her friend that she has a date with a cable installer that evening: “He’s picking me up sometime between four and eight.”
When renovating my first FL home, lots of wires ran nowhere, so before the painters started, we went around to see which wires could come down ’cause they weren’t connected to anything.
ONE WIRE – my internet connection – WAS THE ONLY WIRE THAT SHOULD *NOT* BE CUT. I showed them which it was.
AND you know what happened . . . that was the first wire to be cut. Brighthouse (or whatever it was at the time – Time-Warner, Spectrum, who knows) sent someone out IMMEDIATELY and not only did he fix the cable issue, turns out he knew quite a bit about the history of the area so we had a nice conversation.
After many service calls, a competent technician determined the problem on our land line was with the connection to the house; that was owned by a different telephone company, so that company had to send someone out (when I wasn’t there, out of town for several days) to work outside. But they trampled a lot of hostas and broke the gutter downspout, and a heavy rain dumped right into my basement before I got home. I pestered both phone companies until mine finally paid for the basement cleanup. They did manage to fix the phone connection, though.
(Not that I was any good at phone wiring; in the first house I owned there were phone wires everywhere; previous owners had apparently run a phone bank. So I was cleaning it up and carefully identified the live wires not to cut, and the other dead wires to cut and discard. And then of course first thing I cut the live wires. And while I was repairing them somebody called us and I got jolted with whatever the voltage to ring the phone is.)
The illustration looks a lot like the box on the side of my house, except there’s no gutter near it for them to break (the service in would be the cable going up, and then out of the drawing across to a telephone pole; wires through the wall into the house)..
“. . . (the service in would be the cable going up, and then out of the drawing across to a telephone pole; wires through the wall into the house).
Everything here is underground, for which I am grateful.
This discussion reminds me why we dropped our landline.
A long time ago I heard this line from a standup comic: “I just bought a car. It was a Southwest Bell courtesy car. Never been used.”
Well, *I* thought it was funny.
That last comment reminds me of this from long back in my quotes file:
I had phone service from Continental Telephone. (Motto:
“You’ll Envy the Dead.”) The community next door had GTE.
(Motto: “You’ll Envy Continental Telephone Customers.”)
– M. Van Pelt
Bell Canada service stories (which are actually about the Internet service I had with them. Phone service has been competent, if overpriced).
1. We had ADSL in our apartment. I had a genuinely unlimited plan. No cap, no overage charges on data. This was grandfathered in because they latter began to cap everything and charge for going over the cap. The speed was 3Mbps, which was pretty fast when I got it, but kept falling behind the norm as the years passed.
At one point, I called to ask about a promotional offer I had seen advertised. I asked if taking advantage of that offer, which would have seen an increase in speed (7Mbps!) would mean I meant my genuinely unlimited service and would have a cap. I was told I would lose the unlimited and have a cap. So far so good. I was then told that if I committed to a year-long contract on my current plan (I was on month-to-month at the time), I could receive a discount of $10/month. I asked if this affected my unlimited data. I was told “No.”
A month after agreeing to the contract, I got the bill. It showed the charge and then a $30 data overage fee. Needless to say, I was quite upset. I called service and told them I had agreed to the contract but that I was told there would be no data cap and I should not charged an overage fee. The young man, located in a Philippines data centre, then proceeds to explain to me what the data overage charge is for, as if I didn’t already tell him what happened. At this point, I ask for a supervisor as that’s how you get someone who is actually located in Canada and not reading a script.
I tell her my story and say I want my old plan back. She tells me I can’t have it, doesn’t exist anymore. Then she says that for $25 they offer data overage “insurance” so that no matter how much you go over the cap, you are only charged $25. I tell her I’m not interested in paying anything more than I was before. She says that she can put this on the account and, for the next year, the duration of the contract, she can see I get a credit of $25/month to offset that cost. I agree to this as it seems the best I’ll get.
Next month, I get a bill. Still has a charge for data overage of $30 and no credit.
I call back and immediately ask for supervisor as I see no point in wasting time with a flunky.
I tell her what has happened (a different her from the first). She says she sees the notes of the conversation and that the insurance and credit are not active on the account and that she will do this herself and I will have no further problems. I’m dubious, but hang up and wait for my next bill.
The next month, the bill comes. It has the overage “insurance” on it and two credits for $25. At this point, I decided that I had spent enough time on the phone trying to fix their lies. I collected the credit of $50 per month for the remainder of the contract, then switched to a different Internet provider.
Bell Canada story 2:
When we moved to a new place, we moved our Internet service. We still had ADSL, now with a company called TekSavvy (I’d recommend to anyone in Canada). A much better company, a fairer price, better service, truly unlimited plans. All was fine. Except for the final “mile”.
TekSavvy owns all their own Internet stuff except for the final-leg infrastructure. Due to competition regulations, Bell Canada has to allow them into their central office (actually the various exchanges located around the city) to connect their Internet to the Bell Canada copper (yes, the story is a little old) lines (yes, it was running over the landline telephone line that we had with Bell) that connected to my place.
ADSL technology is distance limited. It may have improved but the limit at the time was 5km. Over that distance, the signal diminishes and the speed gets lower. At the 5km, it’s essentially useless. Well, the SOBs at Bell would not allow TekSavvy to switch my connection from the one CO to one closer to my home. I guess they figured they had obliged them by allowing them into the CO. Nothing said they had to offer the closest CO. Well, this meant that I was about 5km from the CO and my connection was $%^t. Sub-dial up speed. This seemed very petty to me.
This was several years after story number 1 and TekSavvy was now offering cable Internet access in my area as well. So, we switched to that and things improved dramatically.
Now, the cable infrastructure “last mile” is owned by Rogers, so that has not been without problems as well.
Bell Canada story 3:
Bell Canada was rewiring our building with fibre, replacing all the copper lines. In addition to phone service, they also offer all the high-speed TV and Internet stuff that telcos do, so they needed the infrastructure to support that. So, this goes on for some time in the building and they eventually get to our unit. It didn’t take them that long to do the work. Then they left.
Then our phone didn’t work (yes, we still have a landline and it is still with Bell).
We called (mobile phones, don’t you know) the maintenance manager and he sent them back the next day and they fixed whatever they had broken and the phone worked.
These were not contractors either, these were genuine Bell employees.
So yeah, I do not like the phone company.
Well, since we’ve wandered into telecom stories: In 2001 I was running engineering at a very small consulting firm, run out of a townhouse (not the owner’s house: that was actually two townhouses away). We had horrible cable connectivity for download, with upload via dialup. (And the upload link would drop constantly–I wound up writing a VERY ugly Perl script to test it once per minute and, if down, fake the http transaction to log us back on.)
We aspired to an upgrade, to DSL. I called Verizon, who swore it was not available. A couple of weeks later, I got a call from a sales rep from Steel City Telecom, offering DSL. “Sure, we’d love it”, I replied, “but Verizon tells me there’s no DSLAM in the CO”.
“Sure there is: it’s just not THEIR DSLAM”, he replied. A week later we had DSL. Note that Verizon didn’t have our cable hookup, so this was pure ignorance (at best), flat-out lying (more likely IMHO). I already knew Verizon was evil; this was just one more nail in the coffin.
More recently, while we still had Verizon copper to the house, they’d call every week and try to convince us to move to FiOS. Of course they want us to move: it’s not regulated as much, so they can screw with FiOS customers more. They would always say, “You’ll get better reliability!” and I’d reply, “So you’re threatening to deliberately degrade my copper, which has been 100% reliable for 20+ years?” That always ended the conversation, after a stunned silence.
****ers need to lose their monopoly. Ma Bell was never this deliberately evil, just neglectful/monolithic/uncaring.
“Ma Bell was never this deliberately evil”
Do you remember acoustic couplers? Ma Bell wouldn’t let anyone else’s equipment touch their phone lines, and Ma Bell’s modems were horrendously expensive. (Not to mention that you couldn’t own your own phone and had to pay monthly rental on it.)
“Ma Bell was never this deliberately evil, just neglectful/monolithic/uncaring.”
‘She’ didn’t have to be, already having NO competition.
billytheskink – It was “Telephone Line” by Electric Light Orchestra in 1977, not “Telephone Man.”
Telephone Line
Maybe the confusion is with “Witchita Lineman.” A big hit in 1968 for Glen Campbell.
Apparently, Telephone Man and Telephone Line we’re both released in 1977, not sure if they both made it to the top 20.
That’s why I don’t use a land line.
AT&T with their corporate culture of hostility towards their customers. The only possible response that is both proper and appropriate is to not be their customer.
I just looked up Telephone Man. It was by Meri Wilson, and it made it up to number 18 in 1977. It was a sort of double entendre novelty song. Sorry to have incorrectly corrected you, billytheskink.
We have not been happy with our cable TV service or their Internet service in decades. When FIOS first came out we went to find about it. Problem was that we would be required to switch our telephone service from copper wire to FIOS. So we still have the cable service and the copper wire service. Other than when we inquired about FIOS the only time they tried to switch us over was when we had trouble with the lines – our lines run in the back of the houses on the property line over the fences and the lines run rather low so animals like to snack on them – was when we called due to a problem with the line.
But if you want to hear about not wonderful cable service, let me know.
When I started reading the comments and electric companies were being talked of –
As mentioned above our utility lines run on the back property line. We have, however, a second set of utility lines in front of the house which ours splits off from about 2-3 houses north of us. The lines in the normal place – along the roadway – seem to exist to bring the electricity from one point to another and only directly serves the one house across the street from us (house on either side of him face the side streets and get their electricity from lines along same) and the street lights. There is a transformer on the street lines where our lines split off to the back lines. It blows – a lot.
Last week on the 19th I was woken at 7:30 am when I heard an explosion. I rolled over looked at the clock and knew that the transformer had blown – again. I called the electric co and spoke with a computer giving the info. I then called back and using the hffffur system got to a live person to whom I explained that I had called and left the official notice on the computer, but I could save them time and tell them what was wrong and that the transformer blew again and told him about where it was on the street. I did not wake Robert as he would panic. By 10:30 the electricity was back.
Sunday evening (technically early Monday am) at 1:30 am I again heard the transformer blow. Robert started to panic and I calmed him down and then called the electric company – computer could not for some reason file the complaint and it transferred me to a live person. I explained and also told him that it was the second time in a week this had happened. He looks up the records and says to me “Why, this is the second time in a week this happened.” I agree with him. He tells me that no one else has called – I bit my tongue and did not say “I guess they are all asleep”. I again explain where the transformer is. We have an abbreviated version of our late night snack as we cannot make my oatmeal and his grits as the stove is electric and go upstairs to bed. (We have good battery run lamps to use.) As we get into bed I put my old Blackberry next to the bed on the logic that I can check the time on it and not waste the battery in my current phone. I offer Robert my old Palm phone, he says that it is a good idea and goes and gets one of his old cell phones to use. We normally don’t go to sleep for another couple of hours and I need the TV on to go to sleep. I pick up the Blackberry and start playing a game on it. He finds this a good idea and finds a recording of the play “Applause” and starts it playing – concerned the battery might run out and it will not play all the way through. ( I keep my old cell phones charged as I use them for other purposes – and the Palm can still call 911 if needed and is on a different company than either of our current phones – Blackberry had to be replaced when the phone in it died so it is mostly used for games and as a quick reference to what day it is.) We hear the trucks come and see its lights through the curtains. They work for about 20 minutes and then figure out (as I told the employee on the phone) that the problem is up the street. They had it fixed by the end of “Applause”.
But why the heck does this transformer blow multiple times a year?
@Meryl, presumably the transformer is blowing because it’s getting too hot. That could be because it’s under-rated for the actual current used on your circuit, because of phasing problems if its a specific type of transformer, or various other reasons.
It could also be because of the environment. For instance, if there’s a tree limb above it and water drips on it, the water could get in via bad seals and contaminate the insulating/cooling oil, lowering its dielectric strength and leading to overheating. For that matter, a squirrel could be chewing on the bushings.
Are they replacing the can, or just replacing blown fuses each time? (Yes, poletop transformers typically have a fused cutout.) If it’s a common problem, you can almost certainly get it sorted by reporting it to your state’s version of the Public Service Commission, the state agency that regulates utility. PSC is New York’s name. In Massachusetts it’s the Department of Public Utilities, in Rhode Island the Public Utilities Commission. (Can you tell which 3 states my employer is an electric company in?)
carlfink – Thank you. We have lived in this house for 31 years – for 31 years we have had this problem. The electric co (on Long Island and I am guessing it is not the one you work for) is in the middle of working on their system so it will not go down as easily or often when there are storms and husband thinks that in addition to putting in thicker poles they are upgrading their transformers also (I don’t remember hearing or reading same.)
I am guessing that something over it or animal is more likely as it tends to happen at times of day when there is probably less electricity being used as when I call I am thinking that everyone else is away at work or asleep as it the wee hours of the morning.
I will keep your suggestion in mind though.
@MerylA: I work for National Grid, successor to the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO) as well as Niagara Mohawk, Brooklyn Union Gas, etc. You and I (also on Long Island) are served by the Long Island Power Authority, a government agency. These days they hide behind the company they contract to operate the system, Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG). They required us to brand all our equipment as “LIPA” and the bills were in LIPA’s name. They require PSEG to brand equipment with their own name and bill in their own name.
carlfink – Thank you. I know that LIPA is the cover name. National Grid where we are is the name on our billing on same. Nice to know a fellow LIer is on here.