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A friend of mine is in a Peco (i.e. Philly-area electricity) family - his dad was a Peco dispatcher from way, way back. He grew up with these guys. We talked a little bit about the outages, and he said, you know, back in the day, nobody would SLEEP if ONE rate-payer was without power. They were so dedicated to getting people back on line.
Now nobody cares. The other day I put in a new T1 to my house to replace an aging one -- long story, but it's not hard, it's the equivalent of putting in two regular phone lines. You just have to trace them back to the street and make sure you have two good pairs. I was never trained how to do it, but I see what they do, and it's really no big deal. It takes two $5 tools and half a brain.
Well, it took six visits from Verizon to get this done. Along the way they messed up our dial tone service over a 3 day weekend.
They will never recover the costs of having 6 visits to do an install. Especially since on one of those visits the guy sat in the truck doing nothing for a few hours. The profit on this line is probably about $100 a month so the guy probably sat out there for two-three months worth of profit. One smart installer instead of six dumb ones would have saved the company this money.
But nobody cares...
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