TECHNOLOGY, WE HAVE A PROBLEM
/The Boston Globe
BEVERLY BECKHAM
His name was Barry, and he came to my house to install Comcast digital voice phone service, which I requested because my phone bill is huge, though not as huge as my cable bill, which is outrageous. It costs us a fortune to watch the TV that we used to watch for free.
The phone, of course, was never free, but prior to Barry's coming, at least it worked. It rang when someone called, and I picked it up and I could actually hear the caller and the caller could hear me. And unless I slammed it on concrete or the battery went dead, there were no dropped calls, either, which is really the only reason to have a home phone these days. It's nice not to have to shout, "Hello! Have I lost you?" again and again.
"Hello! Have I lost you?" I shout to my friend Anne, who lives in New Hampshire and to whom I can now speak, on my digital voice service, for free.
Technically, the Comcast people are right about this. Long distance is part of the package. The problem is, when I speak to Anne, she can't hear me.
"Well, it's not that I can't hear you," she says. "It's that I can hear me, too. There's an echo on the line, so I can hear me twice. It's like calling London 40 years ago. There's an echo and a whoosh and I can't stand it."
And then she is gone, because my phone disconnects. And not just with Anne but with everyone.
My youngest daughter, who lives two miles away, can't call me at all. When she uses her land-based phone and dials my number, she gets a recording that tells her the number she's reached. But that's it. She isn't connected. She has to use her cellphone to actually reach me.
"You're sure I'm not going to notice a difference with this new service?" I asked Barry after he hooked me up and handed me my contract and my Welcome Kit.
"You won't notice a thing," he said.
Five minutes after he left, the phone rang and rang and rang. And voice mail didn't pick up.
I should have smelled trouble right then. I used my cellphone to dial my home phone, thinking that this was just a glitch, that the new service was warming up or something.
But again the phone just rang and rang.
I dialed Comcast.
"Oh, yes. We're having a little problem with our voice mail," said a nice someone, whom I finally reached after pressing one, then one again, then another one, then three, then waiting, waiting, waiting while some automated voice suggested that maybe I wanted to call back because of the heavy volume of calls.
Later that day, when the voice mail problem was resolved, there was a new voice mail problem. This time my phone said there was voice mail when there was not.
"Just call your number and leave a message, then call back, access your message, and erase it and that should clear up your problem," another nice Comcast person said.
This worked. But it worked so well that the phone stopped telling me when I had any messages. No little reminder in the window. No familiar "beep beep beep" when I picked up the receiver. Nothing.
The Comcast guy is coming back to my house. He'll fix what's broken, I'm sure. And I'll learn the tricks of call screening and anonymous call rejection just the way I've learned to turn on the TV by pressing a series of buttons on three different clickers.
But these things that make our lives easier? They don't.
It was easier when there were no clickers and you turned on TV, any TV, with a knob. It was easier when there was just one black phone hard-wired in the kitchen, and you didn't have to hunt it down to answer it. It was easier just to pick up the receiver and say hello. No screening calls. No call waiting. And no leaving messages.
I used to dial WO3-3046 to talk to my best friend. Now I press 11 numbers to call even across the street. I used to dial "0" for all telephone inquiries. Now I press the whole alphabet and then am put on hold before talking to anyone.
"Keep your long stories long," Comcast says in big bold print on the cover of its Digital Voice manual.
And be long on patience. Because you will need to be to deal with all this.
