September 29, 2003 Archives

The phone went out yesterday during very heavy rains. This is understandable. I'm not thrilled, but I understand.

Yesterday, SNET said we'd have service today (and we very well might). But when Helaine took Steffie to school and there was still no service, she was concerned, so when she went shopping, she called repair with the cell phone.

The automated service said: "Thursday."

On to the live voice. "It's a widespread outage", the voice says. "They're working on it now. It will probably be repaired today."

I would have written about none of this, except about 15 minutes ago, the phone starting ringing every once in a while. Sometimes a short ring. Sometimes a long ring. Sometimes a few rings.

Picking up the phone left us with the hum and clicks we've had for the past day. Sometimes, buried deep in the static, I heard the reassuring warble of low frequency ring voltage.

They're testing and fixing. Great.

But we have to go to the phone each and every time it rings and make sure they're fixing and it's not a real call.

During this time, anyone calling our home has received a busy signal. No "out of service" recording. Just busy. You'd think there's something a little more descriptive they could use?

Yesterday, if you called my number, it was a busy signal. Now, it's just ringing.

I've got a problem with this and the reason is quite simple. We've all been taught to check on the weak and elderly with a call from time-to-time. So, you call Aunt Martha and the phone rings continuously. What does that lead you to believe?

SNET, or any phone company, should be more responsive in a situation like this, where a singnificant number of lines are out of service and they know about them.

This is wrong. You would think a company that deals with this kind of situation on a fairly regular basis would have a better plan.