If you haven't received a call from us lately, it's not only because I don't like to use the telephone.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, our previously excellent phone service started giving us trouble. Callers could hear us fine, but what we heard from them was distorted. Back in the good ol' days of monopoly telephone service (black, rented phones and impossibly expensive long distance), if something went wrong, you knew who to blame, and they knew it, too. Now I can call Switzerland for three cents a minute, but problems invite an endless circle of finger-pointing. Especially when the problems are intermittent. Before—possible points of failure = 1: the telephone company. After—possible points of failure = many: the cable Internet provider, the VoIP provider, the VoiP phone, the modem, the router, or some combination.As the trouble began right before I left town, I decided not to worry about it. When I came back, it was a bit better—I could live with it. Then it got worse again, and I spent a small amount of time trying to diagnose it, but a labor-intensive Christmas present demanded more of my attention, so I resorted to using the cell phone when possible, even though the per-minute cost was worse than in the Ma Bell days. Then we were out of town again and I was able to forget the problem for a few weeks.
We came home. Two things were different: (1) the phone situation was worse, and consistently so, and (2) Porter was home, and he's much less likely than I am to "make do." We began collecting data in earnest, and convinced ourselves that the problem, or at least a major part of it, rested with BrightHouse, our cable Internet provider. The difficulty was in convincing them, and Porter spent a long and frustrating time on the phone. It does not build confidence in a company when you get the feeling you know more about the product than the customer service representatives do. Finally, they condescended to send out a repairman, with the threat that we would probably be charged for the service call because it was clearly our problem, not theirs.
Fast-forward to Monday night, after a weekend of becoming still more convinced that the problem was not ours. The technician arrived, and in about 30 minutes found not one but two problems (one apparently caused by a previous repairman), which he proceeded to fix. Voilá! The phone was crystal clear, and what's more, our Internet speed had increased by nearly an order of magnitude. We had been living with inferior service for years, and didn't know it could be fixed. If BrightHouse had believed how close we were to switching away from their service, they'd not have been so slow to send out the friendly and more than usually competent repairman.
I wonder how many other areas of life could be vastly better if only we believed that they could be, were willing to work on them, and found the right combination of knowledge, tools, and technicians?
