Telco Tales

Pollstar experienced a telephone failure at about 1 p.m. on Thursday, July 13th, that made our main phone and fax numbers inaccessible to the outside world.

Callers were given a variety of recorded error messages until the matter was miraculously fixed that Sunday. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused our clients.

What happened to us is an example of the new world order for telephone companies. Our local phone numbers come through a T1 line we lease from MCI, which recently was purchased by Verizon. They contracted for the lines with Pacific Bell, which became SBC, which recently became AT&T.

Guess what happens when something goes wrong?

Fingers get pointed in every direction and everyone says their equipment is working just fine. Then, as suddenly as the failure appeared, the “problem” is mysteriously fixed.

No one, of course, will own up to finding and fixing the problem because then they would have to admit it was their equipment that caused the outage.