Thanks to all the Corner readers — there
must have been 60 of you — who wrote to me about my problems with SBC’s DSL
service, which has been given me fits owing to the company’s incompetence.
So very many of you wrote with the same horror story, saying that the
company took forever to get the service installed, broke promises, charged
you for services you didn’t order, and so forth. Some tech types wrote to
say forget DSL, which is a hopelessly flawed technology, and go to cable
modem. I said I didn’t want to do that because cable modem service was too
expensive. And a very kind SBC executive contacted me personally and
promised to get his people working on my situation.
Yesterday we got a message at our house saying that the DSL service was up,
and we should sign on. Last night, I tried that. Six times the service
rejected my password, which I typed in slowly and meticulously. So I called
up tech support, and after spending some time on the phone with him, heard
him say, “Sir, our computers say your service won’t be active until 6/02.” I
would have hit the roof, if I had anything left in me with which to fight
SBC. This morning, I got another phone message while I was logged on with
dial-up, with another unfailingly polite SBC executive reminding me that the
service was on and urging me to log in. So, once more into the breach …
and my password was denied.
Comcast is coming over Sunday to install the cable modem. As for SBC DSL,
it’s amazing to me that a company’s internal workings can be so messed up
that they can defeat even the good will of executives trying to make things
right for a single customer. I don’t know what’s going on with those folks,
but I want no part of it anymore.