Now, this isn't actually me in this one, this was submitted by a friend, but he doesn't have a blog and this is too precious not to share with the world.
Our T-1 to $REMOTE_CITY was down, had been down for about 20 hours, and we were having a whale of a time trying to get SBC on-site to fix it. (A lightning strike in $REMOTE_CITY had apparently fried the smartjack.) It was standard Ameritech/SBC crap--constant escalation with no apparent motion toward resolution.
Anyway, on what turned out to be the final phone call, I called to check status. A guy answers, "This is $NAME, how can I help you?" I give him the two-sentence description and the ticket number, and he says, well, there are a couple people in line ahead of you. Hang on, and I'll be back in a couple minutes.
About 3 minutes later he comes back as if answering anew, and--I'm not making this up--he answers, "Thank you for calling SBC. This is $NAME. How can I screw you--I mean help you--today?"
It got better from there. As he's trying to figure out what's going on with this ticket, he's skimming the notes, and kind of half-reading them out loud to himself. "OK, here it's escalated to level 4. Call (mumble), escalate to level 5. Well, now it's at $BIG_GUY's desk. Hmm. The next step above $BIG_GUY is Jesus, so I guess I'm going to have to call him, but I'm not sure what I'm going to say."
And, "Well, you know, this is SBC. When we drop the ball, we do it with style."
We got to a little chit-chat while he was waiting for a page to be answered, and he said, "Lots of people call me whining about their phones not working. <whine>'My phone doesn't work.'</whine> You know what? It doesn't really matter. Go home and tell your kids you love them, and play a game of Parchesi with them. Your telephone doesn't really matter...especially not to SBC."
He was the coolest CSR I've ever talked to about anything, bar none. I got his supervisor's name and number and called him later to tell him $NAME needed a raise, and he needed to hire more guys like $NAME.
This story was especially funny to me for a couple reasons...
