SATURDAY
MY APARTMENT

“NOOOOOO!!!!” I screamed into the phone, loud enough that the poor Third Customer Service Rep from The Cable Company probably didn’t need his phone to hear it in Bangalore. But it was nearing 10:30 Saturday morning and I’d just been on anger-building hold for 20 minutes (”Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received”).

“I WILL NOT RESCHEDULE MY APPOINTMENT!!! THIS IS YOURRRRR ISSUE!! YOU NEED TO FIX IT!!” Technically, it really wasn’t the Third Customer Service Rep’s issue, it’s just that he got stuck with me just as my asshole-o-meter had gone to 11. I was trembling with righteous fury, storming around my apartment with the cell phone jammed in my ear. I was as angry as I have ever been, and that’s really saying something.

“Please hold, sir, while I try to see what I can do.”

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I am probably going to get kicked out the United States for saying this, but I think private companies are the worst possible stewards of our information infrastructure. Our household was without DSL for five days. Five days. If you’re a writer who works mainly on the Internet, communicates via email with 95% of friends and family, and, well, enjoys and prefers reading online publications, five days is ridiculously long.

While I believe everyone on the customer service food chain for our telephone company was sincere in their desire to do something, overall, the response was abysmal. I’m sorry, but if you’re going to outsource your support to India, stop with the scripts already and give the call center staff some ability to actually resolve problems. It isn’t the off-shoring that is the problem: it is the resultant frustration because problems aren’t being resolved. Five days is too long for any utility to be out of commission, barring a major natural disaster.

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I am a map geek. And I am a traffic geek. Back when I was doing my 45-mile (one way!) commute in the Bay Area, I would always check the Web obessively prior to leaving, listen to traffic reports while driving, even call the special TravInfo phone number. None of that was really effective, at least partially because there was no way to get an on-the-fly visual overview of what was going on once I actually hit the road. Not on my budget.

Until now, that is.

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Earlier this week I decided to dump one of my AT&T land lines and transfer my main phone number over to Vonage. While I’m excited by the idea of taking a leap forward into the world of VoIP, and happy to be taking some of my business away from AT&T, the move is not without risks.

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If there is a common enemy that we can all agree on, it’s not Microsoft, the MPAA, or even the RIAA - it’s the phone company.

Every year or so I spend more time than I care to admit dissecting my phone bill and looking for ways to cut costs. Between the obscene charges for “home wiring insurance” and the ever fluctuating rate for “local long distance” I invariably end up spending an afternoon on the phone negotiating the terms of my service with a phone company sales representative. The one constant is that said sales representative is always baffled by the combination of services that appear on my monthly bill.

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