I am an employee of AT&T and the following is my opinion...
I almost fell out of my chair at the breakfast table today! I opened the May 14th edition of the Birmingham News to the business section and saw the report on AT&T storm restoration titled "The Briefcase". It stated, "AT&T Inc. says about 1,500 of it landline customers in Alabama are still without phone service, more than two weeks after tornadoes hit Alabama." According to the AT&T spokesperson, "we have moved in extra forces to expedite this." One more quote and I'll stop, "if customers are without phone service, they need to report the outage so repair crews will know where to go. If they can find a working phone, call 1-877..."
This is a real challenge on where to start. You may have read in a previous blog that I was critical of the restoration efforts put forth so far. Since that blog, I haven't been sent back to the storm areas... (can't blog about what I can't see, right)! I still talk to other technicians and managers even talk, so news gets out. Our crew was told all week that we would work overtime this weekend, but that was cancelled on Friday. I can see why, with only 1500 people out of service.
So, how did we get this low number. Maybe, it's like a word scrambler, but with numbers. It wouldn't be an anagram, but a numbergram! As readers, you can rearrange the numbers just for fun to guess the correct one. Or, maybe, the impression left was just incorrect. It is 1500 in each of the areas listed, so it's a 1500xN=Y. It could even be a misprint on the part of the Birmingham News, maybe digits were dropped, like cell phone calls made in Vincent, Alabama. We may need to search for reputable news agences who have the fewest dropped digits!
I'm pretty sure that a corporate telecommunications giant would never be ethically challenged in such a way as to mislead the public. As employees we have to take ethics training every year and such is a condition of employment(a term heard often these days). I guess it is possible the spokesperson was absent the day that training was given...
Actually, I have it from a good source that the number is very inaccurate! Confidence in my source is extremely high. Before I tell you the number that is probably more accurate, I'll make a guess as to how this happened. Everything nowadays is on a spreadsheet somewhere. Management wants to be able to look online at any time and direct forces based on the "load" or the items pending dispatch. If cables are down, lines in that cable are grouped together and put on hold! The "on hold" status, takes them out of the database list for pending dispatches. In other words, everything looks good. This isn't anything evil. You don't want repair techs repeatedly going to fix service lines where construction hasn't put the main cable back up yet. It would be a wasted trip. But what happens, is the spreadsheet for total troubles is misread! Totals are incorrect if you don't include the "on hold's".
The correct number is somewhere above the 5000 mark according to my source. He hasn't led me astray yet. I've talked to some construction guys and they say we'll be working on this for months! If it was 1500, you could expect days! Where I used to work in Birmingham, seventy dispatches per day was pretty average for our group, so one work center could knock out that few in a couple of weeks. A lot of people are working on this! If you are a customer, that is out of service, please call the repair # at 877-737-2478 and follow up on your previous report by checking the status. I know the automated system is awful! Everyone hates it, but it keeps the number of employees down to a minimum, so the company likes it. Remember the employees who are working outside are your friends! We'll get your phone back on soon and hopefully we won't see anything of this magnitude every again!
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