Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Bill Porter, who edited newspapers in Vermont for more than 30 years and spent another two decades observing and writing about public affairs. He is a member of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the umbrella organization for VTDigger.org.
Just before dawn on Sunday I was popped awake from a deep post-party sleep by the annoying sound of a large truck backing up in my driveway. Stumbling through the dark to the front of our house, I saw the revolving yellow lights of two trucks, both dispatched to our house by Washington Electric Cooperative.
During the night a thunderstorm (that I slept through) had felled a tree across the utility lines that bring electricity and telephone service to our hilltop house. The repair crew didn’t know where the break was, but they did know that the power line serves only two houses, located a half-mile apart and separated by a large beaver pond, a woodlot and pasture land. So, they brought three guys, a bucket truck and a couple of all-terrain carts.
By 6 a.m., in plenty of time for us to make the morning coffee, they had found the break, repaired the line, and were loading up to head out on the next call. “Lots of outages?” I asked one of the young linemen as he loaded tools. “Yeah,” he said cheerfully, “I’ve been working since 2 o’clock yesterday afternoon.”
As he was leaving, he said, “By the way, your telephone line is down, too. You might want to call FairPoint.”
So I did call the phone company, which provides our house with two telephone lines and Internet service. A polite FairPoint employee took my information, and said the line would be fixed “no later than” 6 p.m. Monday. A few hours later, I called again, thinking it would be helpful for the repair crew to know the situation on the ground, so to speak, since that’s where I had found about 100 yards of the phone lines.
“Your crew ought to know that the downed line runs through a pasture and barnyard that are full of farm animals,” I told the FairPoint lady.
“Oh,” she said, “yes, they should know that. They will probably expedite the repair.”
There’s no way to prove that the contrast in the type of business model accounts for the stark difference in quality of service between our phone company and our electric company. But for whatever reason, this little backcountry cooperative with captive customers has consistently out-performed the larger “free enterprise” brand in what used to be known as the public service sector.
No such luck. Thirty hours after the WEC repair crew had restored electric service we still had no telephone or Internet connection and the animals were still threading their way through the fallen lines. So, I called again and, again, was promised the telephones would be back in service “no later than 6 o’clock today (Monday).” (Evidently, as I discovered, FairPoint repair crews, unlike WEC, don’t work after dark.)
An inconvenience but, so far, no tragedy, right? Really of interest only because of the contrast between the performance of the two utilities: One, a relatively large, for-profit, competitive utility; the other a tiny, local, non-profit “franchise” monopoly.
There’s no way to prove that the contrast in the type of business model accounts for the stark difference in quality of service between our phone company and our electric company. But for whatever reason, this little backcountry cooperative with captive customers has consistently out-performed the larger “free enterprise” brand in what used to be known as the public service sector.
That was my conclusion Monday when the 6 p.m. deadline faded into an empty promise. Since that time, though, the FairPoint response to the problem has turned my irritation into fury, and my disappointment in the for-profit provider into consumer retaliation. In other words, now I’m shopping around for another telephone “provider.”
Here’s why:
A half-hour after Monday’s 6 p.m. deadline promise, a FairPoint bucket truck rolled up carrying one pleasant but unhurried repair technician. He checked out the fallen telephone line, cut off a section that evidently was faulty, and said he could not do any more by himself. He would, he said, be back at some unspecified time to put the telephones back in service.
Tuesday morning, checking for messages on our cell phone, my wife found another promise from FairPoint: “Your telephone service will be restored no later than 6 p.m. Tuesday.” And, FairPoint said, “somebody has to be at your house all day Tuesday until the repair technician arrives.” Guess what? No technician. Tuesday evening another call produced another promise and another excuse for the delay: “The technician couldn’t find another technician to help him.” Wednesday morning, yet another promise of repair by 6 p.m.
During one of these conversations with FairPoint employees, I learned another bit of infuriating information when I happened to mention that one of our phone lines was a business line. “Oh,” said the FairPoint rep, “you should have told us that. We would have gotten it fixed much quicker.”
So, as of this writing, it’s Thursday and FairPoint is still a no-show. My now-routine morning complaint brought only the same lame excuse; no second technician. Stand by.
Ma Bell, where are you when we need you?
P.S. on FairPoint
We have telephone service again, thanks not to Ma Bell but to an intrepid young Vermont native who works for FairPoint and, it turns out, had grown up in our neighborhood and now lives in Berlin. He took the bull by the horns, so to speak, and took on the repair job by himself with zero help from headquarters. Here’s what happened:
Thursday afternoon, on my way home from Montpelier, I spotted a FairPoint line truck parked on the County Road about a mile from our house. I stopped and was surprised to find the FairPoint repairman I had last seen Monday evening, the one who had needed a second “technician” to help repair our phone line.
“You mean they haven’t got you back on line yet?” he said with real surprise. “Well, OK, I’ll be over there as soon as I finish this job.”
About 15 minutes later he pulled into our yard. He maneuvered his lumbering bucket-truck down through our barnyard and pasture and, with a small amount of gofer assistance from me and our daughter, within a half-hour he had replaced a 100-plus yards of line and had both of our phones working. In the process he corrected a much older problem that often had created static on one of the lines.
Still no word, though, from FairPoint headquarters (wherever that is).
