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Telecommuters and Downtime?
clearcache asks: "I'm a new telecommuter. My wife and I, former New Jersey residents, moved to a Midwestern city in January. I remain employed with the same NYC company that I worked for when we lived in Jersey. Aside from the normal moving hassles, I experienced some connectivity issues due to the complete incompetence of my telephone company. These issues repeated themselves, and, due to the lack of a good problem escalation policy on their end, it took quite some time to get them resolved (some are not yet resolved!). These problems resulted in a serious loss of time on the job. When I approached the phone company to discuss compensation for downtime, they responded that, since it is a residential line, they do not compensate for downtime. With more and more people telecommuting, it's only a matter of time before the blurred distinction between 'residential' and 'business' telephone lines becomes an issue. Has anyone had experiences like this? If so, what did you do? Does anyone have any general advice about telecommuting and pitfalls that I should avoid in the future? How do the companies that you work for deal with your downtime?" When my connections to the 'net fail and I can't find someplace in the area where I can leech some bandwidth, I am forced into taking the day off. Fortunately for me, Blacksburg, VA is extremely well connected for its size and such occurances have remained rare. How do you telecommuters out there deal with those Bad Computing Days, where for one reason or another, things just refuse to work?
You, my friend, are an idiot.
There is a huge difference between a residential line and a business line... quality of service. You get what you pay for.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
i have no sympathy for you. you are the one that didn't do the research before you signed up with this broadband dealer. When i worked retail i would tell the morons that came in to buy a computer becasue everyone else on the lbock had one, that most people usually learn how to use something before they buy it. The ford dealer doesn't teach how to drive, Sears doesn't teach you how to sew, or wash your clothes. You needed to learn about broadband adn the differences in residential and business class accounts before you bought it. as mentioned in other posts you get what you payfor, adn if you paid for residential then too bad you take the shitty customer service and downtime like the rest of us.Wheni worked hel desk for an isp we had 100s of people callin in to complain about residential 56k connections going down and they could sell their UO, or Ever crack junk on eBay and there fore would not be able to make rent that month. My response everytime would be "If you are going to put your finacial wellbeing in the hands of a technology that is proven to be faulty, then you deserve to get bite in the ass and i have no sympathy for you, adn as a matter of fact i hope you cannot make your payment, adn therefore lose you house/apt and have to live on streets when you'll be used as target practice for some redneck and or gang (depending on area of the country they were from)thus removing you from society, relieveing the world of another lazy ass leech who can't take the time to do a little bit of reasearch to secure their finances." and this is why i didn't last too long at the isp hell desk. you need to grow up, take responsibilty for your own inaction, suck it up, take the loss and above all learn form this, and learn how to apply this learning to other situation so you don't make similar mistakes, for if you cannot perfore this simple task, then it's time for you to sterilize yourself. have a nice day, and thank you called the isp hell desk ;)
Has anyone had experiences like this? If so, what did you do?
Yeah, when I worked for DSL support at Verizon, I got people like you on the phone all the time. Almost as irritating as daytraders. I told every single one the same thing:
Don't base your income on a residential service, you cheap fuck.
There's a reason a cable modem costs so much less than a T1, and the same for DSL. There's no quality guarantee. You want guaranteed uptime, you gotta pay for it.
--saint