And, we're back

I know at least a few of you are expecting a good ranting this morning.

Not gonna happen.


Because it would be an awful lot like being an ungrateful ass, that's why.

As you may infer from my last post, and the one I had Beastly put up, I was seriously pissed at my ISP. I'm not going to apologize for that, however I'm am a bit chagrined at letting my frustration get the best of me. But what you have to understand is this: I'm this way because I was trained this way. Beastly and Janiece can back me up on this, Chiefs are trained in a particular manner and if there's one thing that defines us it's this: Chiefs don't make excuses. Period. And they don't accept them either. Warrants are the same, only more so. Our job is to get things done. When I feel like I'm getting the runaround or a bunch of excuses - I get pissed, fairly quickly.

When I made that last post I was waiting for a call back from GCI Customer Service, which, according the the guy who originally answered the phone, would be no more than two hours. Didn't happen, and as I said in the post, I'd decided then and there that come morning I was going to go looking for a new service provider.

I did get a call the next morning from Customer Service, I wasn't even remotely impressed with the customer service rep's attitude. Eventually she transferred me to Tech Support. The Tech Support rep, Tony, was a completely different story. He was helpful, cheerful, knowledgeable and willing to listen to my rant. He obviously knew his business, but there wasn't much he could do other than set me up for a service visit the next day. But, you know, I sure appreciated his attitude and willingness to listen.

Then regular commenter Jeri got involved.

Which resulted in a phone call from the Customer Service Manager, Manuel Hernandez, who as it turns out is a hell of a decent guy. I won't go into detail, but I came away from the conversation with a different attitude towards GCI.

Bright and early yesterday morning, the service crew was out front. I watched them run back and forth for an hour, trouble shooting. Then, I got a phone call from the service tech out on the pole, Jeremy, explaining that they'd found the problem. One of the recently upgraded distribution amplifiers had failed, which would square with the nonexistent signal strength I was seeing. He had to go get some additional equipment in order to replace it. Which he did. And that fixed it.

An hour after that, Mr. Hernandez called me back to make sure I was up and running.


So, here's the thing: Out of the five people that I was directly involved with at GCI, one of them gave me attitude, but four of them acted as if I was their single most valuable customer and they bent over backwards to make sure I got the service I was paying for. Once I got through to Tech Support, I got no excuses, they admitted up front that it was GCI's issue and they did everything humanly possible to fix the situation as quickly as possible.

I called Jeri to thank her personally for her efforts on my behalf. It should be fairly obvious that there's a certain amount of professional risk when you get involved in a public blog where people are bashing your employer, and I'm grateful that she was willing to take such a risk.

So, I've rethought my position as follows: I'm not at all happy with the fact that I lost service for four days - however, if Jeri, Manuel, Tony, and Jeremy are examples of the type of people employed by GCI, then I'm more than willing to give them a second chance.

So, as I said above, sorry to disappoint you, but ranting about folks who busted their collective asses to make me happy would be pretty obnoxious, even for me.

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Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a splitting headache and four days worth of work I need to get caught up on.

More later.