Monday afternoon we had a big old Florida-in-the-summer thunderstorm blow through. With lots and lots of lightning. (Did you know that Florida is the lightning capital of the US?) I was out running errands while Tim was home for his lunch break, so I didn’t experience it firsthand, but he said the lightning was tremendous. He thought our house was actually hit, more than once.
Clouds after the storm
While the power was unaffected (score one for Progress Energy), the phones were knocked out. Bell South’s automated phone system assured us that they would be back on by Tuesday morning. Nope. So on Tuesday we called back (on our cell phones, of course). The automated system now told us, in effect, “We know your phones are out. Stop bugging us. We’re sticking to our initial repair estimate time of 12:00 noon today.” Uh… that wasn’t your inital repair estimate time, but whatever. A while later someone did actually come out and poke around the outside of our house, then called me (on the cell) later to say that they’d found the problem and were working on it. The guy said that about half our neighborhood is out, although none of our friends here are having a problem. But he said it should be fixed by 6:00.
6:00 came and went. Wednesday morning, Tim called Bell South again and this time the automated system didn’t have a record of our problem. He finally got to a live person, for the first time, only to be told that it had been fixed at 4:30 the day before. Umm… no…. The CS person said they’d basically have to start over and send a technician out to see what the problem is. Great. We called again sometime during the day (all the calls are starting to run together in my mind now) and were told that there’s a major cable out, and they’re working on it. I think they said then that they were hoping to have it fixed by 7:00.
We called Bell South again last night around 8:00. Now they’re just saying that it’s a big problem and they’re working on it. They’re hoping it will be fixed today. I’m not holding my breath.
It wouldn’t be quite as bad if our cell phones weren’t the pay-by-the-minute, no-contract variety. Normally, they’re great and have saved us a lot on our cell bills. But it really rankles to have to pay to call the phone company to see when our service will be fixed!
