Friday, September 26, 2003

I'm Back

I finally called the CEO of RCN (Starpower's parent company) in New Jersey after a week of:

-- "We're having an outage." Well, duh!

-- "We're working on it." I should hope so!

-- "We don't know how long it will be until you have service. It could be a day or a week." Not acceptable

-- "My supervisor, and her supervisor will tell you the same thing." So, no one in the entire company knows what's going on?

-- "We'll send someone out to your house in a few days" Uh, I don't think this is MY problem. I think it's a system problem.

-- "Don't worry, you won't be charged for the time your service is out." Gee, thanks, but you need to do much better than that.

-- "We're going to have someone come out to the neighborhood on Saturday to see what's wrong." $#%^&@#^&**!!!!

All this after waiting an average of 30 minutes on hold each time listening to lousy elevator music.

I actually didn't get to talk to the CEO, but I did speak to one of his assistants who brought up my neigborhood on his computer. "Oh my God!" he responded after perusing the service calls from my area. "There are a lot of people getting no information."

He then spent a half hour trying to reach someone in the Washington area to no avail, but promised to call me back in the morning.

I haven't heard from him yet, but this morning our telephone and cable were back up again. Don't know if it was my call that did it, but I've been happily accepting the accolades of a grateful neighborhood.

So this weekend I'll do a bit of catching up from my involuntary blog vacation. Hope you didn't miss me too much.

In the meantime, speaking of failing infrastructure, this is an interesting perspective on America's Crumbling Infrastructure.