Frigging Phone Companies

A friend of mine at work is a DSL user. He never used his home phone so he wanted to drop it and use just the DSL. He wanted to save some money every month. Who can argue with that? Either he asked the phone company, or they offered to provide the service. I just don't remember. He already had DSL and a land line. He wanted to drop the land line. Sounds easy.

He was out of internet for like a week or more.

He had to get a 'dry line' which is s dummy number that you can't call, it is really an account number. You can't get online information about it. You can't get get people at the phone company to recognize that you exist because you don't show up in their system the same way.

The phone company still requires you to call five places to get a problem fixed. Only now, you don't have a phone number to give each of them as you go through the chain.

He feels like a beta tester, only he pays for the privilege of getting the run around and lost in the system because he wants to take advantage of something the phone company offers as a service. And why not? It isn't like they have a monopoly. Well, cable companies finally got in to the act. I hear the cable companies are not much better about anything outside the primary services offered. I'm waiting for the announcement of a merger between a major cable company and phone company.

It is all going to boil down to internet soon. You don't even need to get internet access over a wire.  I'd start a rant about mobile phone companies, but that is just too much for now.