This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes
R.J.(Bob) Evans, P.Ag.
Professional Consulting for Business & Agriculture
This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes

How many times have you heard that and thought “Damn, I really hope they listen to this one”? 

Last Thursday sometime between 4:50 PM and 5:20 PM my cell phone went dead.  I’m not sure precisely when it happened but I got some email around 10 to 5 and at 5:20 I couldn’t phone Ken MacQuarrie to tell him we were heading down for supper.  So somewhere in between there my phone shut down.  Once we figured out that I couldn’t call out, Marilyn tried calling me and got a message that said “the number you have dialed is not in service”.  Which is slightly better than “that number has been temporarily disconnected” but still not what you want business callers to hear. 

So there wasn’t much I could do at that hour of the night.  I did go online and check my account but that didn’t tell me anything and I certainly couldn’t see any reason why the phone would have been turned off.  Since I was dealing with Sasktel some form of bureaucratic lunacy was always an option but there was no way to investigate that once their business office closed.

Friday morning we dashed around getting checked out of the Delta in time to go visit father before his breakfast.  Then we headed out of town and with Marilyn driving I started racking up the airtime on her cellphone as I tried to figure out what was happening with mine. 

First of course I had to get through all the mindless voice menus which always culminate in entering your phone number.  So I did all that and finally a human voice came on the line, opening with “what is your cell phone number?”  I didn’t bother asking why they wanted my number after I had just punched it into the phone because Marilyn was silly enough to ask that once and got told it was a security measure.  I guess that would be security against morons too stupid to remember the number they just punched in 15 seconds earlier.  It certainly isn't security in any way related to the phone you are calling from because I was calling on Marilyn's phone but punching in my number.

Anyway, I got through the voice menus and eventually reached a live person.  I related my tale and after a while she said she would have to talk to someone else to figure out what had happened.  I persisted and at one point she said that the person who had disconnected the phone was there with her but she still insisted that she had to talk to “corporate” in order to see what was going on.  The instructions to shut it off had apparently come from head office. 

At some point she also asked me if I had talked to my children lately.  That seemed like a bizarre question and it stumped me because I couldn’t remember exactly when I had talked to them.  We chat frequently on MSN, we send text messages and we prattle on Facebook but we don’t actually talk to each other that often.  She said “you have one child in Ottawa and another in Florida” to which I replied “not likely”.  I remember telling her that we had been in Florida and she seemed to be getting increasingly confused and kept insisting that she had to call the mysterious “corporate”.  The Ottawa/Florida connection had enough consistency with our lives to be confusing yet apparently irrelevant.  After all – I have a sister in Ottawa and we were in Ottawa last month but what could that have to do with my cell phone getting turned off?

I was born at night but it wasn’t recently so I didn’t let her get away without getting a name and a contact number.  I forget what the name was but let’s call her “Rose” and let’s assume her extension was 5042.  She said it would take her about 10 minutes to track down what had happened and assured me that she would call me back.  I didn’t believe for a minute that she would move that quickly – she works for Sasktel after all – so I told Marilyn that I would give her 30 minutes and then call back. 

After 30 minutes during which Marilyn & I tried to imagine what they might have done, I started calling back.  Of course I had to go through the obligatory warning about quality monitoring that never happens as well as the requirement to punch in my phone number but eventually I got a live person.  I immediately asked to be transferred to Rose at extension 5042.  “Where is that?”  “How the hell would I know?”  “Well it might be in Saskatoon or Regina”  “I don’t know – she said to call back at this number and ask for extension 5042.”  “It must be in Saskatoon”  “OK – so transfer me”  “I can’t”  “WHAT???” 

Apparently Sasktel – a company that consults with Telcos worldwide – can’t transfer calls between Regina and Saskatoon.  Who’d a thunk?  “So - - I just have to keep calling back and hope that I will randomly end up in Saskatoon one of the times I call?”  “Yes.”  Unbelievable.  So I called back and fortunately must have ended up in Saskatoon.  First bit of good luck with Sasktel in the past 24 hours – things must be looking up.

Whoever it was I was talking to seemed determined that she was not going to transfer me to Rose but I’m a stubborn SOB.  Finally she decided that she could talk to a manager.  “That sounds like a good idea”.  “I’ll get her to phone you back”.  “No, that dog won’t hunt – I need to talk to somebody about this NOW.”  Several times I explained to her that this was a business phone and that it was already well into business hours and MY PHONE WAS TURNED OFF.  “Well, Giselle is on the phone.”  “I’ll hold”.

If this was a TV show the screen would now fade to black, the white letters would come up saying “5 weeks earlier” and the screen would dissolve in again with me reading an email from my sister Chris.  The email told me that I needed to take my power of attorney to Regina, go to Sasktel and cancel father’s cell phone.  We had a really heavy agenda for our time on the prairies and wandering around Sasktel trying to find somebody to show my power of attorney to wasn’t high on my list of things I wanted to do.  So I fired back an email asking for the contract number and said I’d deal with it immediately.

I called somebody from Florida, got reminded about the quality monitoring thing, waded through the voice prompts, punched in father’s phone number, got a voice and repeated the phone number.   If I was less honest (and less stubborn) at that point the next words out of my mouth would have been “this is Ross Evans and I want to cancel my cell phone.”  That would have been the end of it.  Since I chose to be honest, related the details that left mother dead and father with a cell phone that he can’t use and then asked to have it cut off I was doomed.  Then ensued a lengthy back and forth during which I pointed out that they could see that the phone hadn’t been used, they had been asked to cut it off by my sister as well as myself and further that all we needed to do was phone the Credit Union to get the autopay stopped.  That went nowhere and ended with the Sasktel droidess telling me that if I only had a power of attorney then it would be simple.  “But I do have a power of attorney.”  “Oh, well, then all you need to do is fax it to this number and they will turn the phone off.”  Couldn’t be simpler could it?

Now outbound faxing for us isn’t entirely seamless.  We scan the pages, collect the page scans, upload them to RapidFax.com and then they get faxed.  That meant I had to take the POA apart and scan it and then wait for my extremely slow uplink to get it all bounced off a satellite and back to earth.  It didn’t seem to be going well but I persevered.  I’m never 100% sure that a fax has gone through until about 30 minutes after I have tried when I get back either a send report or a failure report.  After about a half day of this I finally pulled out my cell phone and dialed the toll free fax number that Sasktel had provided.  “There is a problem completing your call as dialed.  Please consult your directory and try your call again.” OOOOPS – in other words this toll free number doesn’t work from the US.  That would be the number that I was provided with after clearly identifying that I was calling from Florida.  It could have been an honest mistake – I always get those Atlantic provinces mixed up too.

We pulled out the Sasktel directory that we carry with us, Googled “Sasktel fax” and scoured the Sasktel Mobility website but all to no avail.  Sasktel publishes literally dozens of toll free numbers but not a single direct, real live phone number.  So back through the reminder about quality monitoring, the voice prompts and punching in the phone number in search of a live human being.  This time she provided me with a couple of real numbers but I was starting to get a little cynical by this time so I asked her to email them to me which she did.

I promptly replied to the email with clear instructions to cancel father’s cell phone including his contract number, cell number and his full name.  Then I attached the scan of the POA and chortled to Marilyn about how I had finally defeated Sasktel at their own game because I had a real live email address for somebody inside the organization.  Problem solved.

Not so quick – about a week later back comes a reply – can’t fault them for getting right on that one.  There’s no grass grows under Sasktel when it comes to replying to email.  Merely one week later they managed to get back to me to tell me that all attachments are automatically stripped off inbound email.  It wasn’t all bad news though – by that time enough weeks had elapsed that we were leaving for Regina the next day so I packed my POA and figured I would fax it from Regina.  Which I did although it turned out to be a long distance fax from there – Florida perhaps???  (That would be Florida, Newfoundland – they are outsourcing a lot of jobs there now)

Fade to black – dissolve into the interior of the car by now well past Dundurn.  I’m still on hold waiting for Giselle.  Whoever had put me on hold came back a few times and tried to blow me off but I’m a stubborn SOB so I kept holding and finally Giselle came on the line.  I can’t remember everything that happened from there because the situation rapidly degenerated into a farce when she said something to the effect of “Corporate office received a request from your son to cancel your phone.” 

Those of you who have been paying close attention will remember that I spent a long time searching the Sasktel Mobility website for a real live fax number.  I never found a fax number but I did find a “contact the president” button and I did contact the president.  In that message I pointed out the lunacy of what I was going through and suggested that perhaps they should be less rule bound and more empowering to their employees.  When I clicked “submit” I got warned not to expect a response for 2 weeks.  Which you may remember is only a week slower than they respond to emails – I guess when you’re the Pres you don’t have to move at the same breakneck pace as the rest of the staff.

I was literally speechless “My God – I can’t believe what you are saying.  You put me through Hell for trying to cancel my father’s phone and then you just randomly cancelled mine because the number happened to be on the signature line of an email I sent you asking to have father’s phone cancelled?”  To her credit Giselle was equally horrified at the sequence of events, although as it turned out she had played a pivotal role in its execution.  She said something to the effect of “I’m so sorry – how can we make this right?”  To which I responded “YOU CAN’T MAKE IT RIGHT!!!  Nothing you do could ever make it right now.”  Then I cooled down a bit and told her that what she needed to do was hang up immediately, drop everything and get my phone turned on.  By now it was approaching 11:00 AM so my phone had been off for about 3 business hours.  I told her to turn it back on and then call me on it so I would know it was on.  Again, to her credit, she did that expeditiously. 

The ordeal wasn’t over though.  In the early afternoon it became apparent that having your phone summarily cancelled has ongoing implications.  Like all the email accounts and linkages that you have set up won’t work anymore.  Like you need to recreate your voicemail message and set up your account again.  And you probably won’t be able to set up some of your linkages because the computer servers were never programmed to expect such an idiotic sequence of events.  Which in turn means that you will run up even more airtime correcting the lunatic mistakes that were caused by your so-called telco.

Fortunately I had captured Giselle’s phone number so I called her back in the afternoon.  She got her computer geek on the call with me and together we slowly worked out the numerous problems.  Somewhere in there “Donna” phoned me from the President’s office.  That was doubtless a response to my suggestion that money wasn’t an appropriate compensation for my trouble but that perhaps some indication on the part of the President that he was aware of the circumstances would be appropriate.  Apparently he staffed out that responsibility.  That makes sense – when you are the President of Sasktel you don’t really have time for trivial details like customer service.  Especially so when it is your own blundering incompetent stupidity that precipitated the customer service incident in the first place.  No – it’s clearly best to staff out that call.  Taking responsibility might be a career limiting move and the man has clearly built a career out of mismanagement. 

So what lessons can we learn from this sorry incident?  Well we certainly can’t learn to switch to Telus because the horror stories involving Telus are legion too.  The frustrating part is all the good people that try to make it all work.  We know one really good Sasktel employee personally & I am inclined to believe that Giselle is also a sincere, well meaning employee.  I think she was genuinely horrified at what she had done because it was her that turned my phone off.  She turned it off on a direct order from the idiot at the top but she turned it off nevertheless and I think she sincerely regrets that now.  She definitely went over the top with her apologies for what she had done and went out of her way to correct the error & the resulting effects of that error.   

I will publish every telco horror story that any reader of this story sends me and I will do my level best to insure that the idiot at the top of Sasktel at least is aware that these stories exist.  Given his past history I would expect him to either completely ignore them or staff out reading them to some underling. 

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