Why Pacific Bell Sucks?

Last Updated: 6/17/2005
Current Phone Status
Voice Line: UP
Fax Line: UP
Ricochet: out of business
Cable Modem: UP
See latest entry

NOTE: This is a chronicle of my war with Pacific Bell circa 1998 to 1999. My phone is working now, but I'm still getting lots of fan mail from users all over the web. Click here to jump directly to fan mail and links to other Pacific Bell Sucks page.

This is the unending saga of our war with Pacific Bell to get two telephone lines installed to our house. I have a feeling that this war is not going to end soon, so come back often since I will be updating this regularly. I'm building a Pacific Bell Horror Stories Fan Mail and a collection of "Something Sucks" links.

Who/What is Pacific Bell?

Good question.  When I first wrote this page, I assumed that every one already know what kind of company Pacific Bell is. Given the "Bell" name, it is a utility company, regulated by California Public Utility Commission, which provides local phone service. The parent company is SBC of San Antonio, Texas, a giant created through a series of mergers and acquisitions--a big face-less corporation.

Many people claimed that we have choices in local phone services. The reality is that we don't. They still act like they are a monopoly and use any tactics to drive competitors out. For example, even though they are required by law to share the landline with competing companies to provide local phone service, they are notorious for breaking the law and make life hell for their competitors. I'm very happy to see that FCC fined them $6M for such violations.

Are We Living In A Third-World Country?

The abridged version of the story is, we ordered service on 5/20/98 and today is 7/15/98 and we still don't have a phone yet. I think people in Russia get phone service installed faster than that.

According to California Public Utilities Code, Article 2896(c),
gopher://leginfo.public.ca.gov:70/0./pub/code/puc/02001-03000/2895-2897

The commission shall require telephone corporations to provide customer service to telecommunication customers that includes...Reasonable statewide service quality standards, including, but not limited to, standards regarding network technical quality, customer service, installation, repair, and billing.
For the complete California Public Utilities Code, refer to the following URL:
gopher://leginfo.public.ca.gov:70/11/pub/code/puc
There is currently a proceeding on Telecommunications Service Quality. I think it is interesting reading :-)

History

Coming soon...

Tell Us Your Story

This is the email my wife sent to the "tell us your story" link on Pacific Bell's website:
  
Date: Fri, 10 Jul 1998 132012 -0700
Subject: My story on PacBell's "tell us your story" link
I moved into a new house, and ordered 2 lines with PacBell on May 20. The service was scheduled for May 28, between 8-5pm. On 5/28, the service engineer didn't show up until 545pm. 45 minutes late, fine. After some investigation, he concluded that he was given a wrong "hub" number, therefore, can't finished the job. Oh, one minor detail, this engineer was only assigned to one of the numbers I ordered, which means whoever was assigned to the other number NEVER showed up. 

From then on, it's one reschedule after another, along with the same tag line over and over again "We apologize for the delay, and we are doing the best we can... blah blah blah". My last schedule was July 7th. What happened? Well, completely predictable. Some engineer went out there and claimed that there was no cable to run the wires to the house, when in fact (or so I was told) that the cables were laid out on July 1. So, the case got kicked back, and I got the pleasure of waiting for yet another reschedule on the 14th. What does that tell me? PACBELL's internal screwed up, internal miscommunication, and I as a PAYING customer have to suffer the consequences! 

Today, I called the customer service (925-901-4010), and spoke to your representative (Susan). Since she couldn't do anything other than telling me that "hopefully it'll work on the 14th", I've asked to speak to whoever was in charge. Susan put me through to her supervisor, Betty. Betty said NOTHING but EXCUSES for your continued failure. "We can't gaurantee anything. This is like to going to buy a car, and you are asking that the car will work forever..." Well, let me tell you, whatever car I buy, I can be gauranteed that I can at least drive it out of the lot ON THE SPOT, AT THE TIME I ORDER! So, where is the service that I ordered??? Then, she started lecturing me that I was being irrational, and THREATENED to hang up the phone if I don't stop "yelling" at her. Wow, what a concept! A supervisor at PacBell's Customer Service threatens to hang up the phone at a customer who's been waiting for a SIMPLE BASIC phone service for 1 1/2 months. I was NOT amused, NOR intimidated. Five seconds later, she DID hang up on me! 

So, what kind of example is this SUPERVISOR setting for her fellow workers? What kind of training (if any) has this SUPERVISOR been getting and giving with regards to dealing with customers? What kinds of images is PACBELL portraying for itself? I know I'm not alone, and the only thing that allows you to get away with it is because you are still the monopoly. But don't get too comfortable! With the advancement in technology and continued public outrage, there WILL BE one day where you no longer dominate the market, and you'll be surprised at your rate of losing customers. I'm waiting for that day, and in the mean time, you can be assured that I will continue to spread the moral of this story - PACBELL SUCKS!

Where To Call?

925-901-4010   This appears to be their service center which seems to be on voicemail all the time. Don't bother wasting your time here.

Pac Bell HQ   415-542-9000.  Just say "I'd like to reach someone at the Executive Offices". This is the place where some action is likely to happen.

I sent email to Seven On Your Side KGO7 (sevenoys@kgo-tv.com) about this and they said that I should complaint to CPUC instead. So much about that.

So I called Consumers Affairs at CPUC at 1-800-649-7570. There's not much help there either. You just get a bunch of voicemail prompts. These watchdog agencies are totally useless.

Chronicle

5/20/98

Local telephone service installation order placed with Pacific Bell.

(lots of history to be added later...)
 

6/17/98

Called Pacific Bell to see what's going on with our phone installation order. They found our installation order numbers and then gave me another number to call. This is their infamous 925-901-4010 number which is totally useless since it is on voicemail all the time.

6/18/98

A "Susan" called me back and said that the job for construction has been ordered and that it will be done by July 7. I exchanged voicemail with her several times complaining that it is completely unacceptable that it should take this long when the order was placed almost a month ago.

6/19/98

More voicemail back and forth with Susan and it is still July 7. We started shopping for better Cellular phone service, cable modem or Ricochet (for internet access), MRE, etc. for a long drawn-out battle.

7/10/98

Called Pacific Bell Headquarters and talked to Mrs. Clemons. I described the whole problem (all the way from May when the order was placed) to her and she said she will take care of it. Gary Lawrence called and said that they will send a technician out on Monday.

7/13/98

Gary Lawrence called late in the day (around 5pm) saying that the lines should be working. He called Yulin earlier that day too and said that the lines are working and will even call us at home in the evening to make sure.

I got home and saw a note outside my door saying that both lines are working although only one of them is actually wired up to inside the house.

I tried inside the house. No dial tone. Being an expert in troubleshooting PacBell problems, I took a regular telephone and went outside the house to plug it into the box on the side of the house. No dial tone either. So it is not my problem.  In other words, both the technician who left the note outside my house and Gary Lawrence who left me the messages at my office are wrong.

Since I was once a Electrical Engineer, I know that there is supposed to be 50V DC between two poles of a working telephone. I took my Radio Shack multi-meter outside and tested it. Sure enough, there is absolutely no voltage between the poles. So, now you know. You cannot blame me that my telephone is broken either.

7/14/98

I left message with Gary Lawrence in the morning. He called back around 2pm and asked me to call 611 to report the problem and they can arrange a technician to come out to look at it. It may be an outside problem or it may be an inside problem although he thinks that it is unlikely.

I called 611 and the people just passed me around.  From Repairs to Customer Service. And the Customer Service rep (Stephanie) said that, "Oh, you should be in Repairs. I wonder why they passed you to me."  I told her that I have "No f*cking idea, and please excuse my language.  I'm pretty p*ssed off at Pacific Bell already. If you pass me onto another person, I'm going to scream."

She put me on hold for some time and then passed me onto Kathy in Repairs. Sigh! She tested the line and said, "Yes, I can see that there is a problem. I have to ask a service technician to come out to your place. I will have to schedule an appointment for a 8am-5pm slot."  I told her in no uncertain terms that I will not accept a time slot, but request a specific time when someone will show up. She put me through to her supervisor Kim instead. I related the whole story from May 21's order to the current lack of dial tone. She insist on giving me a 4-hour time slot which I have to wait. I repeated to her that I will not accept that and if I will talk to someone higher up if I have to. So I have to. She transferred me to Teri who is the Manager there.

I repeated the whole story to her and told her whether they can have someone there to repair the problem. She wants to give me that 4-hour time slot thing and I insisted that my plumber said that he will show up at 9am and he showed up at 9am. Why can't Pacific Bell do the same thing. She said we are regulated by CPUC and they cannot do that. What a joke!

I finally asked her if I am required to be home to get a dial tone into the box outside my house. She said not, but if the technician needs access to the inside of the house and we are not home, then we will be charged $45. I told her "no way" because Gary Lawrence said that it is their problem. She said instead of having us wait at home, they can have the technician call me at work so I can go meet him/her at home when they show up. I said when. She said this Friday. I said what am I supposed to do between now and Friday. Do I need to call your San Francisco Headquarters to complain? That seems to be the only way to get any service. I said I called last Friday and Gary Lawrence was assigned to this and at least sent someone to my house yesterday. She said okay, tomorrow then and hung up. I'll believe it when I see it.

I've counted a total of 6 different people on this one call to 611 and I still cannot say that I feel that the problem will be resolved tomorrow.


It's 6:20pm now and Gary Lawrence just called me back. He said that he will follow up with the technician to make sure that this case will be closed tomorrow. I mentioned to him about the ridiculous $45 charge that they will assess if I'm not home. He said that I should examine the bill when it comes and look for any suspicious charges. If there are any, give him a call and he will try to take care of it.

7/15/98

Gary Lawrence called and said that it will be around 4pm today when some one will come.  He called to make sure that I'm not too anxious waiting in the morning.

At around 5pm, Gary called and said that the technician is working at the house. I told him that I'm available via pager and can get back home in 20 minutes in the technician *really* needs to get into the house.  Since he does not know if it is necessary, I prefer to stay at work so I don't need to make an unnecessary trip. This is the last conversation I had with Gary today.

7/16/98

At 9:00am, I opened up the telephone box on the side of the house to check for voltage again.  It is still 0 volts between the poles for both lines. My conclusion is that the technician was not able to get a dial tone there. I'm pondering if I should wait and see when Gary will call (say, 5pm?) or should I make a preemptive move and call him. 

12:15pm. Called Gary Lawrence and left him a message that the lines still don't have a dial tone as of this morning. After calling Gary, I called Pacific Bell Headquarters. Wow, nobody is answering the phone. The company is "out to lunch".

1:06pm. Gary left me a message saying that he sent a fax last night down to the technician's supervisor. The supervisor voicemailed him this morning that either he or one of his lead foreman will go to the site today. The name of technician is Doug Craig. From what Gary sees, it is still not working.

7/17/98

Checking if there is any dialtone and voltage on my phone lines has just been added to my morning rituals. "Get up, take a shower, get dress, feed the dogs, feed myself, dunk down an espresso, walk the dogs, check if the phones are working, go to work, call Pacific Bell". Nothing unusual today.

At 12:51pm, Gary Lawrence left me a voicemail saying that he left a message with the foreman who is supposed to take the call yesterday to make sure that it was done. He is waiting for a call back but thought he would check. I guess the communications within Pacific Bell isn't that great either.2:10pm. I left Gary a call telling him that I checked at the box outside the house and there does not appear to have any dial tone although it appeared that someone has indeed entered through the sideyard and did some checking there. I suggested that understanding what work has been done and what tactics has been tried to get a dialtone to me would help. At this moment, all I'm getting is checking and not seeing anything.

7/20/98

Fair is fair, both our phone lines are working as of this evening.

A technician showed up at 9am this morning.  Since I'm still home, I got a chance to talk to him. He said that the line is fine although I still cannot get a dial tone inside the house. I went outside and showed him that plugging my phone into the outlet outside the house does not help either. It turned out that he check the left side (incoming wire) of the box but not the right side after passing through their "splitter box". So he concluded that the box is bad and promised that he will swap a new box. So far, one of the two lines is working. He said it will take a few more hours to get the second line working as well.

It's after dinner, so I decided to check if the phones are working.  Omigosh! They are! Can I believe my ears? A telephone with dial tone? In my house? After two months? It's time for celebration! We called all our friends and family to tell them that we are now back connected to the civilized world and how not to take life for granted and all that jazz.

Just When You Thought It Is Safe To Surf...

7/28/98

The last time I used the phone was in the morning about 8am when I dialup to Earthlink to get email at the office before going to work. Between then and 4pm, both phones went dead without any notice. So much about the celebration we had last week. I guess when I asked Pacific Bell to get the phone lines installed, we forgot to tell them that we intend to use the phone for more than a week!

This phone outage was particularly bad. My dad was at my house waiting for my carpenter to come by to finish up one of the cabinets in the living room.  While he was there, he discovered that the phones are not working. There's no way for him to reach me, and no way for me to reach him. But since I don't know (or don't think) that the phones are not working, I call and the phone "ringed" and "ringed" as if no one was home.  It got me worried that something might have happened to him. I left work early, fought rush hour traffic to go home to see what happened.  Fortunately, he was okay and it is the !#$@^*& phones that is not working.


I arrived home at 6:45pm and it was still bright outside. I opened up the telephone box and checked the voltage. A big fat zero volt. When the phones were working a week ago, there is a DC voltage of 50 volts across the terminals. Something definitely happened. Duh!

I called Danny Garcia, who was here last Monday to install the lines. Of course he wasn't at his phone. I left him a message telling him that the phones stopped working. I called Gary Lawrence with another long voicemail message explaining what happened and asked him to call me on my cell phone or my pager.

7/29/98

I was very busy at work and did not have time to deal with this Pacific Bell silliness. Nobody attempted to call me either.

Oh yes, I went to a Shell gas station to get my car smog checked. It took only 20 minutes and service was great. Now only if telephone companies work like gas stations...In your dreams.

7/30/98

It's 9:10am.  I'm updating this page on my Ricochet modem. I'm wireless. Pacific Bell is not involved in the creation of this page. Hallelujah!

7:15pm. I had a few questions with setting up my Ricochet modem.  I called their 800 number and their technical support is very good. I'm starting to like this wireless modem gadget more and more. In addition to the wireless convenience, they modem-setup time is also much faster than that of analog line-based modems. I clocked the modem at 28.8Kbps (i.e. 2.8KB/second) during HTTP download. Most client-server based applications such as POP email download and web browsing worked quite well. There appears to be some slowness when using telnet or other character-based interactive applications. There must be some sort of packetization of data that caused the slow response time when typing a character at a time on a telnet window.

Palo Alto Utility is also soliciting home owners to participate in a Fiber to the Home trial. The cost is $1,200 start up cost plus a monthly fee of $10-35 for a 10Mbps fiber and about twice as much for a 100Mbps. The start up cost is pretty steep. But just imagine what you can do with all that bandwidth. You can use Net2Phone and avoid this whole Pacific Bell mess.

7/31/98

I called Pacific Bell's 611 repair number since I have not received any response back from this Gary Lawrence guy or from this Danny Garcia technician. After navigating through their voice prompts, I got to this guy named "Mike". He asked for the information and said that someone will be there to look at the problem before 5pm tomorrow. I'll believe it when I see it.

8/1/98

9:00am. Richard Jordan came and started looking into the phone problems.  He showed up, left some equipment at the telephone box and disappeared for a few hours.  He came back and one of the two lines start to work. I asked him for the reason of why the phones went out.  He said that some subcontractors of Pacific Bell screwed up outside and fried some equipment.

While talking to Richard, I told him that Pacific Bell's service is very unpredictable, but I appreciated that he showed up on time to fix the reported problem. I agree with other people on the Net that Pacific Bell technicians are nice people, just that Pacific Bell is incapable of handling the workload and hired lousy service people who handles their phone. He said that he has worked for Pacific Bell for 20 years and that their recent 2 years' service and breakdown record is just terrible. The line shortage was predicted by technicians since the early 90s, but the company did not do a thing to address it until now.  Now, they invented this electronic line splitting whcih allows 2 phone numbers to share one twisted pair. But the side effect is that both phone numbers will go down when the line fails.

I learned a new trick.  Dialing 211-2121 will connect you to a recording which tells you what phone number you are on.


A note was left outside my house at 4pm saying that one of the two lines is working.  But I checked and both lines are actually working!  Who's confused?

8/3/98

Another Splicing Technician, Heath Myers, showed up at 9am to repair the broken phone lines which are no longer broken.  I told him so and sent him away so he wouldn't break it any further. He left me his business card and say that page him if the line drops dead in the next 30 days.  Nice guy.  I asked if I should call his office number or page him. He said I should page him directly because the people at the office don't know a thing.

6/1/99

This evening, the phone was working up till 8:30pm. I logged off the computer to make dinner. After dinner and a break, I wanted to check email one more time before going to bed. It's about 11:30pm. There's no dial tone! This must be for our one-year anniversary at this house.

I called the Pacific Bell Repairs number on my cell phone and was put through numerous voice prompts, including a solicitation message on their "distinctive ringing" feature. How lame! Trying to sell me more service when my basic phone service isn't even working?

I finally gave up and went to bed.

6/2/99

I woke up in the morning and checked the phone. It's working now. I hope it stays that way. Amen.

8/18/99

It's dead again. I tried to dialup to my ISP to do some work around 11pm and there's no dialtone. I'm too tired to deal with PacBell. Good night.

8/19/99

Too busy at work to call Pacific Bell. I called them up in the evening on my cell phone when my 300 free evening minutes kick in. The guy on the other side said unplugged all the phones, wait 5 minutes and plug them back in. May be the system will reset and the phones will work again. Appointment has been made for Saturday 8/21/99.

No such luck with unplugging/plugging in the phones. It still doesn't work. I suspect that it is just some corporate BS to get people off the line with some hope that miracles happen.

8/20/99

In the morning, I took my multimeter outside to check the phone line voltage. No voltage. So it is definitely Pac Bell's problem. Here we go again...

8/21/99

Some guy showed up around 1pm. Started looking outside and told me "Yep, it's dead, Jim". Gee thanks. I figured that out two days ago. At the end of the day, he said that it has something to do with their office stuff. He put the wires outside my house back to the way it used to be and said that someone will get back to me later. Yeah, right.

8/25/99

It's now 7pm and looks like my home phone is still dead. I called David, the service technician who came on Saturday, and left him a voice message saying that it is still borken.

8/26/99

The following note was left on my door. "We had some cable trouble that would have knocked out the two lines on your DAML. It has been repaired and your numbers are working at your home..." I wonder if they would have fixed it if I did not call yesterday.

Anyway, I received another "fan mail" about why Pacific Bell Sucks. See end of this page for link.

1/17/2003

My phone has been working pretty much flawlessly for more than two years now. Isn't life wonderful? I've been insisting that let's not change a thing! But somehow MCI slammed itself onto my fax line and a long-distance call made accidentally without 10-10-xxx dialaround put a $10 bill on my account (for two 1-minute fax calls). We called to complained and they reversed the charges and removed all default long-distance service companies from my phones. I was telling my wife that hopefully that this won't mess up anything. This was about a week ago. And we got a few cryptic mail from PacHell saying something like "thanks for your recent order...yady yady yada."

This is the strangest thing or may be it is just coincidence. My wife said that one of the phones in my study appears to be switching in and out earlier this afternoon. I was thinking that it must be time to retire my 10-year old corded phone. Upon further checking, none of the phones in my house worked. It must not be my phone set at all.

1/18/2003

Waited a day just to see if the phone lines fixes themselves. Fat chance. Things rarely happens this way. So, I opened up the outside phone box and checked that there was not dialtone on either my voice or fax line. I called my fax line from my cell phone and it rang into some body shop. Looks like someone "stole" my line! OK, time to call the PacHell line. To save you time in locating the number to call, here is the link to their web site or you can just call 1-800-310-2355.

I called the number from my cell phone. It's a hell of a voice navigation maze. After about 20 minutes on the phone interacting with a computer (and hearing more commercials on why I should add more "services" from PacHell), I have made myself an appointment for the next day, Sunday, between 8am-5pm. My wife asked my why Sunday, don't we have other things better to do? I responded saying that 70% of the chance is that no one show up or show up late. We'll just get on with our life. If they show up, they'll figure out what to do.

1/19/2003

Some guy showed up as early as 9am. I told him the problem (which he should have all that in the "case" already. He was asking which jack in the house I want it to work. I said firmly that, "No, don't change anything on my punch block. I just want dialtone on the incoming jack into the phone box." He looked, disappeared for a while, then back, then disappeared. The phone worked for about 10 minutes, but then stopped working again. Finally, he came back saying that he has done all he can and gave me a new line. We just have to wait till Monday when Central Office can activate my line. I told him that it was working for a little while. He responded saying that's someone else's line. Whatever.

1/20/2003

Next morning, another (human) person called my cell phone and asked if problem has been fixed. I told him that it's not and the other guy said it should work today. He said what other "guy". Do I have a "name"? I said "No, he did not offer." Advice: Always ask PacHell repair people for their name or business class, just in case. Anyway, he said he will send someone else to take a look. Hmmmm, I was pretty calm and happy with this call.

When I get back home from work, there is a (computer) voice recording on my answering machine saying that my problem has been fixed. I guess it did.

6/17/2005

It's been a while since I last had trouble with my Internet connection. I've been using Comcast Cable for a while and paying $59.95/month for quite a while. The connection is good and fast. I frequently get 200KB/sec in download speed. I don't think DSL can beat that. I know at close to $60/month, it is quite steep. And I also know that you can get a better deal if you also subscribe to Comcast's cable TV service. Since I already have a DishNetwork, I don't want to pay for another cable TV service even though it may net me about $2/month savings. It's just not enough to change my momentum.

Things changed a couple of weeks ago. Some Comcast sales guy knocked on my door saying that he can offer me a deal to drop my monthly fee to $45.95/month. I said you want me to subscribe to cable TV, right? He said no. Just sign here and you get the lower rate for 6 months. Sure, why not. And I said there won't be any service interruptions, right? He said, "of course, not." Hmmm...how do you tell if a salesman is lying? Answer: "His lips moved."

This morning, another Comcast guy came by to say that he is here to install cable TV. I said no thanks, I did not order it. I only use the Comcast Internet service. He walked away "disappointed."

Two hours later, my Internet connection was dropped. I can ping the DNS servers, but not the gateway. Oops. I called Comcast customer service. The gal on the other end was very patient and nice and after about an hour on the phone, she said that my account has been suspended. After all these years, I finally mellowed out and did not scream at her. Another 30 minutes later, I'm back online after she "straightened" some stuff out for me. Damn, my 1.5 hours on the phone earned me the about $90 in savings over 6 months. There's no such thing as a free lunch!

Fan Mail

Since I published my story on my web site, I have been getting lots of fan mail telling me about their battles with Pacific Bell. I've decided to start a new section to share these stories:

Why This Page?

Throughout history, there are businesses who simply don't care about their customers. I search the web and found a few support groups of people who felt the lousy service and decided to speak out electronically.

What do I do when I'm not fighting with Pacific Bell: Visit my home page.


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