We experienced some downtime here at Crossed Wires on Thursday and Friday, due to “backhoe attenuation”. Grrr!
We moved house (as I’m sure I blogged previously, despite my apalling reputation for keeping up-to-date blog entries), and there is (was) a vacant block next door. Construction started recently, with the digging of trenches for installation of drainage and electrical. Well, cutting a long story short, their trench work went a bit too close to our phone lead-in — I guess “straight through” would be one alternative definition for “a bit too close”.
So, Susan was without a phone while I was out of town. It took me ringing up the builders’ from Canberra to make sure somethng was being done about it.
I’ll leave the obvious rant about carelessness alone, because the fact that our lead-in was not properly installed in the first place was probably a contributing factor to it being cut (it had to be repaired when we moved in, because the fencing installation crushed the conduit).
Kudos to Telstra on this occasion: well, not kudos so much, but an interesting insight into their problem management process. When Susan rang them, they said “minimum two working days to fix a fault”. In our case, that would have meant we would have been without service over a weekend — so I was angry about that. Since it turned out not to be a Telstra problem though, by not responding immediately they’ve managed to avoid what would have been an unneccesary callout — likely saving their fault folks for a real Telstra problem. I wonder if that’s the real reason for the two-day wait — “give the punter more time to find and fix their own fault so the don’t bother us”…
Crossed Wires 