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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?
Maybe I've been out of the loop to long. What does a CD-ROM have to do with internet connectivity? Surely all you need is a telephone number, username and password (assuming the isp endpoint is running PPP, or perhaps SLIP)? Does AOL provide these details on CD-ROM, or just some proprietary dialler/sockets software? I remember Demon internet used to sell a connection pack that included Trumpet Winsock, a sockets implementation for Microsoft Windows, but I gather recent Windows releases have built in Internet connectivity and (of course) are bundled with Microsoft Internet Explorer.
CLECs that try to do phones, and pick up 1/2 to 2/3 of the loop charge are just loosing money and they provide poor service.
There are few companies that would voluntarily let loose or release money. However, CLEC's may certainly fail to retain it. I believe the word you were looking for is losing.
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if your IT department is too short sighted to make recommendations and reimburse for proper service levels for telecommuters and then tell you to pound sand for wages when you loose service
I find it hard to believe that any contractor worth his salt would ever let loose or release telecommunications service. On the other hand, it is certainly possible that one could fail to retain it. The word you were looking for is lose.
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