Res Ipsa Loquitur

I am extremely lucky (plus I've lived in the same place and done the same things every day for decades) so I never experience that kind of frustration, but a friend travels constantly and is an endless source of similar stories. He is convinced that all of it is due to an absence of pride which has led to shoddy workmanship or performance, and is evidence that the American laborer/vocational worker/technician is so lazy and inept that we will be a 3rd world country in a few years. The more he brings it up, the more I am starting to feel that it's not that complicated. The credibility of any "final" request (what the person who performs the real work actually hears) is inversely proportional to the number of times the request has been repeated or passed on. Elements of a request will be corrupted along the line between those who receive a request and those who perform what has been requested, and the more relays, the more corruption. My first clue was the game we used to play in grade school. The teacher would whisper a phrase or sentence to the first child who would pass it on to the next and so on until the last would say it out loud. We never even got close. Another clue was emergency services radio traffic. Until a few years ago the larger agencies with better radios would dispatch alerts or information and this would often be relayed several times before it finally reached the officers (those who do the actual work). We could listen to all of the relays, and usually they were close enough to work so we didn't intervene unless it got real bizarre. Which it could. Several years ago I dispatched an alert for an armed robbery suspect, Black male armed with pistol, wearing white T-shirt, blue-jeans and white tennis shoes; driving a blue Ford truck with LOWRIDER in script across the back window. By the third relay in was a armed (didn't say with what) Hispanic male in a white lowrider, no clothing description. I'm sure the officers in that town were prepared to neutralize the first white lowrider that cruised by, to the best of their ability and with a great deal of pride, but it wasn't anything like what I requested. It just goes better when you have a direct link to the work force. Like here, I started grade school with nearly all of the telephone company technicians.

Best we can tell the original work order was entered incorrectly, which started the whole sorry mess. And you're right. If we had had access to the installer, the entire situation could've been avoided.

Now we've run into a problem with the dialup that we've not been able to solve. Only one of our computers will connect; the others get various error messages. Luckily, it's my desktop that's connecting correctly. ;-)

Now if I could just find time to read my e-mail.

I hate SBC

So do I. In the half-dozen or so home or office moves I've made since I lived here, they have screwed up my phone service every single time....which took days or even weeks to get fixed. And don't even get me started on the billing errors they've made or the hours we've spent getting those corrected.

All our other utilities & cable are up & running fine....the service techs even showed up exactly at the scheduled time. I don't understand why the phone company is such a problem.