Dear Editor:
As a long time, resident of very rural southern Jefferson County, we depend on CenturyLink’s phone as our primary communications because of limited to no cell coverage. Being elderly, we must be able to contact doctors, pharmacy, fire and rescue, law enforcement, ambulance or life flight regardless of weather conditions. The landline is our sole source of emergency contact when a medical or other emergency occurs. We both have medical issues.
We have no way to call the phone company to report the outage. We have to leave the farm to call them. I do not like to leave my wife alone because of her medical conditions. It is difficult for her to get around. She has had two medical incidents during the current outage.
Recently we have had 4 multiple day phone outages. When they were reported, Century Link required 3 days each time to get a technician on site. The problem is always in their equipment. On June 12th, it went out again and is still out. A technician was scheduled to fix it on June 18th. He never showed. When I checked the status of work order the evening of June 19th, it was listed online as completed. No one told the phone it was fixed.
On June 20th, I requested an online chat with customer support. Only 66 ahead of me. That did not go well. When I shared that the work order showed completed but the phone did not know it. He informed me there were no outages in my area because it is not in his system. When I responded “Bull shit, the phone is not working.” He took offense at my profanity and threatened to shut down our chat. Telling me I am too stupid to know the phone here on my desk is working when it is not, seems a lot more offensive to me.
This level of service is totally unacceptable in our situation and anyone else that needs phone service. Why would our state agencies grant a monopoly to a firm that is obviously not up to the task? Are there other residents with similar problems?
At there are numerous others with similar issues. How could we run this issue up the flagpole and get the state to re-evaluate their selection of CenturyLink?
Larry Davis