Incompetent Repairmen

Reader Contribution by Sam Moore
Published on September 28, 2015
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For the past two months I’ve been having trouble with my phone line. Nancy and I frequently get cut off while talking to someone on the voice portion of the service, and the high-speed U-Verse line for the three computers in the house quits working at the same time. Both of these services are provided by AT&T over the same pair of wires from the central switching office in town the approximately two miles to our house.

Since we first experienced trouble there have been four different repairmen here, some of them more than once, plus I don’t know how many times a so-called “test man,” usually with an accent and located who knows where, has “re-booted” my modem and assured me the trouble was fixed.

I hesitate to call these guys (at least most of them) incompetent – a couple of them have really tried – plus I spent 35 years as a repairman for one of AT&T’s old “Baby Bells,” the Ohio Bell Telephone Company, as well as its successor, Ameritech. During that time I had my share of tough cases of trouble, although it seems most were resolved in a little less than two months.

But enough about me – slipshod repairs are nothing new as attested to by the following story from the editorial page of the June 1915 issue of Motor Age magazine.

The Incompetent Repairman

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