One of my phone lines is out. It's been out for more than a week but that's okay. I have a couple of lines, and I'm sure that after the big rains that hit Los Angeles, there are folks who need a repairman more than I do. So I didn't flinch when, eight days ago, they said the earliest appointment they could give me was today, Saturday the 15th, between the hours of 1 PM and 5 PM.
Well, he — I'm assuming it'll be a "he" — still isn't here yet. A nice lady in the phone company repair division says he's still coming. Of course, at 5 PM, another nice lady in the same department told me he'd be here within the hour. These are not the first two nice ladies in my life to string me along and lie.
There's got to be a way in the age of the Internet and cell phones and pagers to make this process more efficient. Those nice ladies have computers in front of them that tell them exactly where the repairfolks are, how many appointments are ahead of mine, etc. When the service people leave one job, they phone in or otherwise inform HQ that they're on their way to the next. How difficult would it be to route that information to the consumer? Imagine if on a day when I'm expecting a visit, I could get periodic e-mails that say something like, "Repairman 37 is completing Service Call #6 for the day. You are #9. His current estimated time of arrival is between 7 PM and 8 PM." I could even route those to an account where I could pick them up via my cell phone. That way, I could go about my business and have a more useful idea of when I need to be here. I'd planned to go to the market and buy some things, dinner included, after the guy left…but that was when I thought that would occur by 5:00. Had I known I'd still be waiting here at 7:30…
My phone company (SBC) keeps trying to get me to contact them via their web page. When I call them, I sit through endless announcements that I can order services, check the status of an order, request service, etc., at their site. Which I'd do if that site ever worked. So far, every attempt to transact business that way has taken twenty minutes and led to a notice that my business cannot be processed at this time and I should phone them…which means listening again to all those recordings that say I should try using their website.
Assuming they ever get the site working — a big, perhaps foolhardy assumption — I would certainly use it. I'd especially use it if it did things I like just described, keeping me informed of when the repairguy's going to get here. How can a communications company be so bad at communicating?