Web Site Succoth, Phone Tech Succeedeth
His name was Josh. He was polite and friendly when he called me to announce his imminent arrival and Tam says he checked in and went right to shooting trouble. Our NI looked okay, the drop wire wasn't as bad off as I had feared, even the connection back at the fat multipair cable running up the alley was fine. He knocked on the door, told Tam he was on the trail of the problem and vanished....
Minutes later, he called my home number from a few blocks away. At one of the giant, oversized phone boxes where 19th-century twisted-pair copper phone wire meets 21st-century digital something-or-other (fiber, a big stack of raw, screamin' T-carrier, I dunno), there was a very old-fashioned problem: a water leak! Every time it rained, my line (and plenty others) was getting shorted out.
Our DSL circuit, a supersonic silent scream, hardly noticed (or so we thought), but the phone line went right out whenever water got in.
All better now, more than 24 hours ahead of schedule -- and Internet service sure seems to be a lot faster, too.
ETA: He says the leak is fixed now.
Thank you, Josh from AT&T!
Good news!
ReplyDeleteThat is if they can stop the water leak.
As I noted yesterday, my one AT&T techie experience a year or two ago was exceptional. Glad to hear yours was, too.
ReplyDelete"fiber, a big stack of raw, screamin' T-carrier, I dunno"
ReplyDeleteDesigned some of that. I think your words were actually in the engineering spec. :-P
Good news.
ReplyDeleteHusband works for Verizon, he likes your description too lol
ReplyDeleteYou know, I saw your subtitle and started to wonder if AT&T had somehow forced you and Tam to start camping outside.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukkot
(double c is the old fashioned transliteration)
But your experience mirrors the one time I had to deal with AT&T. The tech politely and efficiently discovered the problem was in a box half a mile away, and fixed it; meanwhile AT&T kept wanting to take a message so someone could call me back on the phone number that wasn't working.
Kisnevi: Nope, though a family a ways up the Monon Trail had pu up a sukkah atthe appropriate time the past Fall. Noticed it and thought it was pretty kewl; while I am not especially religious, observances like that are as close as most people will ever get to being able to touch really deep history.
ReplyDeleteAT&T's history is not nearly as deep, but even with some of the zanier CWA/AT&T work rules, they do have a very fine tradition of feild techs who kno what they are doing. A normal TelCo tech is worth at least six Cable TV techs, or, alas, 10 satellite TV guys. :)
(PS: I am delighted to read that a couple of folks who have BTDT with telcomms like the "big screamin' stacks of raw T-carrier" description.)
ReplyDeleteAnd, once again, Extremely High Tech (well, to most Americans) is brought down by a low tech fault. Restores one's trust in Murphy...
ReplyDeleteWhen my neighborhood became houses instead of the empty suburban cow pasture it had been, our phones would go out with the rain for the same reason: water in the Gig Green Box down at the corner.
ReplyDeleteThis happened for over a year, not every time it rained, but usually with hard rains. Then one day a new technician apparently got sent over to blow dry the connections and instead he or she replaced the Big Green Box's original metal door, which had air vents, with a solid panel door.
No more water shorts when the rain blew sideways in a strong wind.
There are good techs and there are genius techs, and it is easy to tell the difference when you see a genius at work.