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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 might have to use dial-up and aol trial CD's while you wait for your connection to come back
Much of the Midwest is in SBC territory since they bought out Ameritech.
Yeah, but this guy isn't even in the midwest, or has a very hazy idea of where it's located. He says he's in Virginia. That's either the south, or the east, but certainly not the midwest.
I also must say, if he's paying for a residential line and using it for business, then he's essentially cheating the phone company and of course they aren't going to be so kind about compensating him. If he (or better, his company) had paid for a business line, there would certainly be more reason to bitch.
This is the problem, people try to dance around the logical rules that are set, and then complain when it eventually bites them in the ass.
I'm glad to see that one of you "big city" people that have taken high speed connections for granted for so long, is getting shafted by the phone company! Welcome to BFE (bum fuck egypt) also known as Western Kansas. When we got a new phone line to use for internet, our connection speed dropped from 49333bps to 26400bps. When I called the phone company, I was told that we were just s.o.l because we lived so far out in God's country that it would be a few years yet before they updated all the phone lines to handle the faster connection. With no cable internet service in town and wireless so damn expensive, the general public doesn't have much choice on the ass raping the phone company gives us everyday.
So in response to you "poor baby I couldn't whack off at work for two days because my phone line sucks....", I say FUCK YOU, get over it and move back to the city you yuppy scum!
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