serinde

More precisely, 4:30pm, and I should have known better than to start a Covad call at that time, even for a topic that should have been Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am. Instead, I missed my train and the train after it. I leave you to picture how much delight this gave me.

Scenario: a user who recently got dry-line (that is, not line-shared) aDSL called in because his line is down. He'd noticed a bit of instability since the install, but it's generally been okay, with full speed throughput at that. He also noted that, at the time of the installation, he and the Covad field tech had discovered that the inside wiring in his building was utter crap (but seemed to work sufficiently), and moreover, instead of the demarc being outside at the junction box, it was upstairs in his bedroom. Theoretically, this means that the inside wiring is actually the ILEC's problem. In practice, it generally means telco fingerpointing.

I open ticket. They eventually do loop test. They see nothing immediately apparent so ask for co-op testing (this means: they have the customer unplug the router, they run the loop test, and compare the result with when the router is plugged in). At 4:30, I conference together the user and one of the Bombay Bombers so that we can do this thing. It should take 5-10 minutes, tops. HA HA HA

The co-op testing is done. No short appears in the line so they want to dispatch a Covad technician. Fine; I anticipated as much. The fly in the ointment is that a Covad truck roll is usually a billable dispatch (to the tune of $200 and up): if they find any problems on the not-Verizon-side of the demarc, it is charged. I point out the following facts:

1) The Covad technician confirmed that the demarc is the phone jack in the bedroom. Therefore, anything before that (including all the inside wiring) is, by definition, Verizon's side. So, wherefore the Covad truck roll?

--Our droid confirmed this as being shown in the install tech's report, but also tried to claim that since the install tech Did Stuff with Extending the Loop, and so the customer *must* have asked him to do this (Whereat I, to user, in conference call: "James, did you tell the tech to do any such thing?" "Indeed not." This of course did not help, because it isn't part of the script, but I got a little dark gleam of happy out of rubbing the droid's nose in his bullshit), so it was Covad involved. Or something. He was losing cohesive English at that point.

2) This was a professional install (as a dry line install has to be), which the user paid $175 plus tax for the privilege less than three weeks ago. If, above, we accept that the inside wiring was a Covad job, then therefore Covad is going to charge the user another two hundred bucks to fix something that apparently their guy did not do right the first time. Can this be so? Yes, yes it can. Unfortunately, Covad's phone firewall no longer permits transferring to a supervisor; they put you on hold and go ask the supervisor themselves. And this is done, and the droid comes back saying yes it is still charged and tries to explain about warranty being off the router; and I point out that we do not give two hoots and a holler about the router, we are talking about inside wiring work that a Covad technician did within the past month and is not working right; and he wound down and had nothing useful to say except that it's a billable dispatch if the IW is bad.

So the user's considering cancelling, and no blame to him if he does. And Covad wonders why everyone's just going with their local ILEC.

I'm going to rant to our service rep, not that it will help, but maybe if we are fortunate someone downstream can be delivered a heap of misery.