I got a comment from faithful reader Gary on my last post about my not posting for a week. I thought he was exaggerating. But no! I haven’t posted for a week!

With the week I just had, how can that be?! Oh, right, I don’t like to post too much about my jobs. Well, I will be sharing one anecdote shortly, but I’ll just say first that right now I am working about 30 hours at my outside job and at least as many for myself. That leaves me just enough time to sleep, cook, tease my cats, and keep The Apartment tidy. It doesn’t leave much time for bloggable activities. 🙂 Just hang in there, okay? This will all be worth it when I go south this spring and have new border crossing stories to tell. 🙂

So this week’s amusing anecdote is once again brought by some of the most laughable Canadian organizations, our telecom companies.

Try to follow this…

A new tenant called Telus to have his internet connected. A Telus rep came to do the hookup, but discovered that the wiring was bad from our box in my office to the tenant’s apartment. He told me to call Telus to have them install a new line.

“But you’re Telus, why can’t you do the work?”

“Actually, I’m a sub-contractor for Telus. I can’t do anything without their authorization.”

Oh, okay. He gave me the business contact number for Telus. I called and was told I needed to call another number. I tried that number and it was not available in my area. So I called back Telus and decided to try my luck with another rep.

“Oh, we can’t help you. Your equipment is with Bell. You have to call them and they’ll contact us so we can get a subcontractor to do the repair.”

(I swear I’m not making this up.)

I was given, again, the number that didn’t work. Thankfully, I caught the rep before he hung up and he was able to dig up another number for Bell that he said would work.

Next, I called Bell and explained the situation to them. “Well, yes, it’s our equipment. But why should we have to call Telus? Call them back and order through them. They’ll send us the information. Then call us to schedule the repair so we can schedule it with Telus.”

(So Telus can then schedule it with a sub-contractor, right? Really, I cannot make this stuff up.)

I hung up with Bell and called Telus again. This rep said the same thing as the last one, informing me that the person at Bell was completely wrong. Here, try this number, you should get someone smarter.

So, back to Bell I went. This rep agreed that Bell had to take my order, but she needed to do a credit check on the company, never mind that we have an account with them and that we’re asking for a line to be repaired, not a completely new one to be put in, yaddi, yadda, call me back when you have the mountain of information I asked for, bla bla bla.

I decided to go up the chain of command at my company and get some advice. It took some persistence on my part, but I was finally advised to have the tenant call Telus, tell them at the first install failed, and that they need to come fix the line.

The tenant looked at me like I was an alien when I told him this, trying to figure out how this was going to work since he obviously had no authority to have major structural work done in the building, but he went along with it. He came back a short while later to tell me that Telus had no idea what he wanted but they’d be sending a sub-contractor tech to talk with me the next day.

The sub-contractor arrived on schedule(ish) and discovered that there wasn’t really anything wrong with the line. The first technician missed something that was easy to repair…

As my best friend would say :::head desk:::

Next week, I have to go through all of this again to get three new lines hooked up for our intercom system. I’m starting to understand how some people end up throwing their phone through the telecom office window!