Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Sometime mid-Thursday, my dial tone went away. I was asleep at the time, and noticed when I woke a few hours later.

Although I'm writing checks to one of their competitors, I am still at the mercy of Verizon's repair schedule, because they own the wires. When the issue is service rather than price, this version of "competition" doesn't exactly give the consumer meaningful choice. And this week -- yes, this week, still -- the issue is service.

No dial tone means no PPP means no TCP/IP means no email or LJ. If you've sent me mail this week and had it bounce because my disk quota was exceeded, now you know why. If you've expected a reply from me and not seen one, now you know why. It was supposed to be repaired on Sunday (yah, they said Sunday) but the repair tech "missed the appointment" and didn't bother to inform me or my telco. It's been rescheduled for Wednesday, which would make this a full week-long outage. I'm at anniemal's now, and will try to get caught up on email tomorrow (but don't count on it -- I'm pretty far behind). I hope my phone service is restored by the time I head back to Baltimore, but ... I'm not sufficiently optimistic to make a prediction.

Obviously, Verizon is now completely out of the running for any broadband service I may buy later. Right now, I feel that the sooner I can get away from relying on Verizon for anything, the better. If a storm or an earthquake had cut off thousands -- even hundreds! -- of customers, I could see a lengthy delay for repair. But I would have heard about that on the evening news. If they can't get a line repaired (symptom: no dial tone, just a faint buzz, no foldback) in a few days, then they must not have enough repair staff for the number of addresses they serve.

Either that, or they're playing games with the schedule to penalize folks who switch to another provider, in which case they're abusing their monopoly status with regard to the wiring, and are out of the running for my business for playing dirty. Either way, DSL is out. Ifwhen I can afford cable, I'll get rid of my POTS line entirely and wash my hands of Verizon. Until then, I'll stumble along as cheaply as I can and look for other options. Colour me disgusted.