Failure to Communicate

My land line is dead today. Here are the sequence of events that have led to this:

1. I called Cox Communications about two weeks ago to switch my land line to their service. They said ok, and scheduled a technician to come out and install it in about a week.
2. A couple of days after that, my phone goes dead. Fearing SBC had gotten the order to turn off my service with them too soon, I called them. SBC sent out a technician, who found the line was bad and strung a new one. Unfortunately, he connected it to my neighbor’s line, so for a few hours I had their phone number. Another technician came out and fixed that, and said someone would be out in a few days to bury the line.
3. As scheduled, a Cox technician came and installed my new phone service through them. He showed me exactly what he did, and was able to fix a problem that was caused by our inside wiring. He also had to run a new wire, and scheduled someone to come bury it in a couple of weeks.
4. Today, two guys from SBC show up to bury their line. When they finished, I had no dial tone. One of them specifically asked, “Your phone is with Cox, isn’t it?” To which I responded yes, it is. They couldn’t fix it, so they said a SBC technician would be coming to fix it.

After they left, I went out to take a look. It took me about ten seconds to see what the problem was: Not only had they buried the SBC line, but they had wired it back into my home phone system, thus disconnecting me from my Cox phone connection.

This is not the first time we’ve had problems with SBC. I used to have to pay them to screw up my phone service, now they do it for free.

Once this is fixed, if SBC ever knocks on my door again, I’m releasing the hounds.