I guess it has been a few days since I posted. They have been busy. Work centric mostly – last night until 9 with a public meeting. Then there are those things that pop up from no-where to steal your time (and give you blog fodder).
It actually started yesterday, or really on Sunday. But for us – yesterday. We got a call from the police department saying that a phone that is listed in our work name was calling 911 and hanging up.
So – first you have to figure out which of the many phone numbers you have it is (that was easy – they told us), and then where that phone number is used. It turns out it is a number for a line we have running to one of our well houses. We had to put it in when we built the well house because it has a fire sprinkler system, and is supposed to call a monitoring company when it detects trouble.
Well, after a few years of paying a company to wait for a call we were able to convince the fire marshall that an uninhabited cinder block well house could probably call the District over our telemetry radio that we use to report its operational status (like – I’m running, I’m not running, and the good old intrusion alarm). So this particular phone line is not in use. And there is no telephone. And even when the line was connected to a box that could dial people waiting for its signal it would only send a fax type tone, and it didn’t know how to dial other numbers.
So we did the intelligent thing and unplugged the alarm company’s box from the phone line. Now it couldn’t even think about calling them.
Except that it did not stop the 911 calls. Had one (or some) at 8:48 this AM. So one of the crew is off to investigate. We did tell the 911 operator that it was not a real alarm, but we were met with one of Sammamish’s finest parked in front of the wellhouse. (It is behind a high school, so maybe he just wanted to see what the kiddies were up to as well.) Well, he watched our guy unhook every wire in the phone system that could possibly be considered ours (not the phone company’s), disconnect the battery, and basically leave it so the only phone line was from the phone pedastel behind the building to the interior of the building. Done.
Except that less than two hours later it called 911 again. Getting chummy with the 911 supervisors about now. They gave me the list of calls the well had made over the last three days, usually in series of 3. (Since we did not hear about this until day 3, the cops must have been spending lots of time at the well.)
So – the next course of action was to call the telephone company. Note that we left this until last because they are so pleasant to deal with. The midget I spoke with (sounded rather large actually, but I am thinking this is the size of the brain located in his head) said it had to be our equipment, and kept interrupting me. I finally asked him to let me tell him the entire story, that we had disconnected everything we had, it wasn’t our wireless phone (no physical phone exists), and on and on. He graciously agreed that for only $110 minimum he could send a technician out to tell me the same thing in person he was telling me on the phone. So I politely told him I thought we would just cancel our account instead. He gallantly gave me a different phone number to call (couldn’t transfer me – interesting).
So I got tired of the whole mess and gave the new phone number to our IT person to handle the disconnection. November 20th sometime between 9 and 5. So one more night of 911 calls, and then we’ll see what happens. If the midget mind had been nicer we might have gone the, “let’s figure it out” route, and they would have MAYBE gotten to give us a bill, if it turned out to still be our equipment, and would still have us paying a monthly bill for a number we don’t currently use.
Customer service – in these times you think it would be more important.
Well that’s enough words to count for a few days.
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