I live in Montgomery Village, part of a portion of Montgomery County that was affected by a massve outage. I had no phone/ DSL service for 14 days due to a “central office” problem. After 2 weeks of missed appointments, time off work, and over 20 phone calls (cell phone minutes, time off work…$$$) I got fed up and e mailed The Gazette. They did a story due to multiple complaints. In this story, verizon spokespeople essentially denied the problem. www.gazette.net/200531/montgomery/news/287799-1.html
When I told verizon about the article, and my reporting of them to County Office of External Affairs, a miracle occurred! The DSL and phone service that wasn’t going to get fixed until “tomorrow” (for the millionth time) suddenly was reactiviated!
Hence, my speaking to you tonight.
Sniff
Its good to be back.
I guess it doesn’t pay to be nice.
Anyone else have this prob?
Moving thread from IMHO to The Home Of Things That Suck-The BBQ Pit.
Bastards. Nope, we weren’t affected, but when we moved they certainly took their sweet time in switching our phones. We were without for 10 days, which is a BAD thing when you have kids.
My dad’s bill has been free for the past 4 months cause they keep screwing up. He spent 2 hours on the phone (ironically) trying to straighten it out. You would thind 4 months of free service would be incentive to get on the ball, but nooooooo
I hate being at their mercy. They are not accountable to anyone.
“We’re the phone company. We don’t care; we don’t have to.”
– Ernestine the Telephone Operator (Lily Tomlin)
I’d file a complaint with the Maryland Public Service Commission.
They are accountable. As mks57 points out, there is a state agency which oversees utilities like phones and electricity.
You need to find a different provider. There should be CLECs operating in the state.
I’ve looked over the major events for Maryland that were reported on or around 14 days from yesterday but not seeing anything labeled Mongomery County. Do you know where your central office is? I’m thinking you might be served from either Gaithersburg or Rockville offices but I’m not seeing any major outages there either.
If it was a small-scale outage (single T3 or below), there might not be a major event alert published.
Size of the event is irrelevant. Two weeks without phone service is unacceptable under any conditions.
That’ll teach me to try to be helpful.
I disagree with the word “any”. Hundreds of T1’s were out of service in lower Manhattan for many weeks after 9/11. We’ve had contractors cut through multiple 1800 pair cables resulting in lengthy outages.
All I was trying to say in my previous post was that outages affecting a small number of lines won’t show up on my radar because I’m in a switch NOC. Hundreds of hicap lines have to go into alarm before I see events at the switch level. At lower levels, it’s up to regional wire centers to monitor their loops.
If the outage affected only the OP, s/he should have been getting daily status updates and escalating to management if the updates were not satisfactory (and the customer defines what is or is not satisfactory). If it was a major outage, then it’s unlikely that people were just sitting on their hands for two weeks. That’s why I was asking for more details.
Well ain’t that some shit. I get home and no dial tone or DSL. I’m going to need alibis from everybody posting to this thread.
I didn’t do it. Nobody saw me. You can’t prove anything.