Remember this from the other day?
Well, I told the so-called “telephone support tech” that it wasn’t on my end. Sure enough, here’s what things were like when the field tech called to see if I still needed him to check my end:
I relayed that info to the local field service tech while he was on the phone with me, asking if I still needed him to come by and check my equipment (cos that’s the way then “idjits” in phone support wrote it up, of course) and he clued me in. It seems that my area’s infrastructure is being converted from overhead lines for the primary feeds to buried cable (long overdue), and we should have received notice of temporary interruptions or degradation of service. Of course we did not… as have none of the other folks who’ve called in with the same issues.
Communication’s wonderful when it happens, but I have noticed over the years that a growing number of supposedly service-oriented businesses are failing to communicate critical information in a timely fashion, if at all, to those they supposedly serve. And responding to critical information communicated to them by customers? Also flagging. This is especially true of businesses that have nominal government licensed monopolies for a particular service in a designated area. (I had to pester one company for six months to get them to actually test their equipment and find what I already knew from my own diagnostics: that it was faulty and in need of replacement. Six months.)
I do appreciate our cable company’s local field service tech guys, though. Knowledgeable, competent, informative: they’re the best thing th company has going for them, IMO, especially since phone support is so sucky.