Caught in Maw Bell
Ten Months & Counting for a Phone Installation
No we’re not in a rural area. This is a city of over 3 million.
I moved into this building in October 2005. Needing 2 extra phone lines, we set up the installation service with Bell. It took 3 visits to get the temporary lines working reliably, and by that time the dig to bury the permanent lines had to be postponed till spring thaw.
Not to worry, we were told, all would be completed by end of March.
My calendar says August is ending.
Bell has been here at least 10 times during the past 10 months, including for service interruption due to weather knocking out the temporary lines. Each visit required a minimum of 3 hours including 2 men in a truck with travel time and gas. During their most recent visit, I picked up a business line to make a call and found it being used by one of the repairmen to chat to a buddy about the bars they’d been to that weekend.
Excuse me?
Oh, he was just using my line while he waited for another guy to come back and that wouldn’t be more than an hour.
I’m not paying anything for this.
Exasperated, I ask, how long would you guys stay in business as a private company? You’d be bankrupt in no time!
Where’ve you been, he responds. The phone industry was deregulated here years ago. We have competition now!
Really?
Yeah! he says, haven’t you ever heard of Rogers?
Right. You mean the cable monopoly that now has the right to offer phone service just as the phone monopoly can offer video? Sigh. Would you please just fix the danged phone so I can go back to work???
Yes ma’am, well it won’t be today ma’am, but I promise it’ll be done shortly. The guy was here for 3 hours of waiting for another guy who didn’t show and then left.
The ‘final’ installation was booked for last week. No show. Calls to 611 elicited a sincere apology and a re-booking for October. Now we’ll see if they can get this done in exactly one year.
Guesstimate how much these 2 ordinary phone lines have cost so far and tell me how any company could stay in business.
What bothers me most about all this is the spin and the resulting perception that we have free enterprise in this country.
A quote from a book review by Jean-Guy Rens of
Deregulating Telecommunications: U.S. and Canadian Telecommunications
by Kevin G. Wilson:
In decision after decision, Wilson draws quite a disconcerting picture. What everyone persists in describing as “deregulation” never took place. The phenomenon that actually occurred was, rather, “re-regulation”. Indeed, by introducing competition into telecommunications, the regulatory body quickly discovered that new entrants would be unable to dislodge the former monopolies on a level playing field. To seize a bridgehead in the telecommunications market, the new entrants needed help. The CRTC helped them by inventing “asymmetrical” competition, which imposes a relatively heavier constraint on former monopolies. What was being created was a new regulatory framework that “promotes competition, not by removing regulation, but by giving regulation a new pro-competitive orientation” (p.261).
Isn’t the bottom line here that your average Canadian is working for the public purse the first 9 months of the year while most every service the government controls (especially medicine) continues to deteriorate?
We don’t have time to notice any of this right now, though, because we’re all trapped on the phone with “Emily …your automated phone attendant.”
