I hate you. I hate you with an intensity normally reserved for the UNC athletic program. I normally defend you people against my co-workers, by pulling up a copy of the Local Order Handbook, and showing where your little, piddly, total Bullshit clarifications are actually valid.
Today, however that has changed.
First, you clarified me because you said I had used the wrong TOA on one of my Directory Listing request, essentially telling me that my customer is not allowed to choose how his business will be listed. You know? Fine. What the fuck ever. Business? Business Personal? They all go to the same place in the phone book.
Then you turn around and clarify me because I did not give a BTN for the only line I am not migrating. You know what? Look in your LOH, I’m not supposed to if there’s only one line remaining. That’s why I called your work leader, who agreed you were in error, and the LSR was clean. She handed the order back to you for issuing.
I suppose you took it personally though, because you turned around and clarified me because I included a DL request for the remaining line, as required in the LOH. If this were really a valid clarification, then why the fuck didn’t you clarify me on it when you clarified the other DL request?
Little fucking martinet. At least I’m not dealing with Verizon.
Ah, that feels better. My apologies to anyone who has no clue what I’m on about.
TOA …Terms of Acceptance?
BTN …Billing Telephone Number
LOH …Line Order Handbook? What kind of dark ages telco are you dealing with?
LSR …Line Sharing Record?
DL …Delete Listing?
Gaackk. At least their unfortunate reps aren’t dealing with YOU. Shame on her for not knowing the tariffs well enough to give you correct information, and shame on you for getting your panties up in a bunch about it.
Close.
TOA = Type of Account in reference to the Directory listing request. In this case I was dinged because the rep decided the additional listing should be classified as Business Personal instead of Business. The difference is trivial, but I could see her argument, so while it was annoying, I had nothing to complain about.
BTN = Billing Telephone Number. Also refered to as the lead telephone number.
LOH = Local Order Handbook. It’s about 1500 pages, and BellSouth totally revamps it every three to six months. If you do not become one with the LOH, you will never be able to successfully complete an order with Bell South.
LSR = Local Service Request. It is the standard form Competitive Local Exchange Companies (CLECs) use for ordering service from the RBOCs (The Baby-bells)
DL = Directory Listing.
Actually, this was the third invalid clarification request on that one order. I honestly believe it was a case of someone who was getting off on a power trip. Unfortunately, there is so much in the telco process which depends on arbitrary interpretation of tarriffs and regulations, that it is not worth getting upset over every little rejection/clarification. This was just a case of the straw and the camel, and rather than explode with frustration at some schmuck whose job it is to answer the phone, I thought I’d use the Pit to vent some.
Update: I spoke with the escalation desk. This order had been reassigned, and since completed.
Note: If you’ve ever had to deal with Verizon (especially the former NYNEX group), you know everyone else is a pussycat compaired.
Maus, I feel your pain. I’ve been out of telecom for over a year, and I still felt my dander getting up when I read your OP, as if I had the same problem only yesterday. I still wake up in cold sweats sometimes, muttering acronyms in my sleep: “CLEC … BTN … UNE … TISOC … CSR …”
But you hit the nail on the head when you said at least you weren’t dealing with Verizon. They suck. Totally, completely, and utterly. I had to deal with Verizon and I now have only a cell phone because I hate dealing with those bastages so much.
I’ve actually had a NYNEX rep laugh at me and tell me that while White Plains and NYC are in the same LATA, they still wouldn’t delever my T-1, essentially because they didn’t want to.
Yup. Sounds like them. I also love it when they refuse to fix area code switching problems in overlay regions because they can charge 10¢ a minute for “long distance” calls between customers in the same building, instead of including the calls in the local calling plans. It’s always fun to deal with customer service for that! Because they never actually acknowledge that they created the NPA-NXX combinations.
I despise BellSouth with the fury of a thousand suns: they raise incompetence to an almost mystical level, and then dance backa nd force between incompetent malice and malicious incompetence like tapdancing mosquitoes.
But I love Birch. Birch telecommunications, www.birch.com, the folks that came by our office and showed us how to cut a couple thousand off of our annual phone bills, the folks who gave me a customer representative’s cellphone number so I could reach her at any time, the folks who refunded us nearly a thousand dollars for BellSouth’s mistake. They totally rock nads, and everyone should check them out.
I used to love dealing with small, upstart telcoms. They were hungry for the business, and bent over backwards to accomodate clients. Just the sort of personal touches that Daniel mentions. Not all of their equipment was state of the art all the time, but then that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The older stuff was tried and true. Meanwhile, AT&T with all its latest-greatest could be incredibly inefficient when something broke down. Only a few people knew enough about the newest technologies to be effective at fixing them. Plus, with the small guys, you made only one phone call. There was never any “you need to call so-and-so”. The only unfortunate thing is that what happens when the small ones are really good is that they grow. One of the best ones I dealt with was called TelecomUSA. They were acquired by MCI. It wasn’t long before we went elsewhere.
Friday I said, “Screw it!” and cancelled the original order, and turned around an resent the exact same order witten up exactly the same way as the first one, before I ended up altering forty-five thousand times to suit your every little whim.
It completed yesterday. No clarifications. No errors. No problems.
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