So, the solitude around here for the past few days has been enlightening, in that I’ve learned that New York’s premiere telco still doesn’t have its shit together.

My T1 went down at 12:53 PM Eastern yesterday, and my ISP’s automated trouble system immediately noted it and generated a ticket to their networking group. It was quickly determined that the problem was between me and them — in other words, in Verizon’s territory. Verizon did some testing, said they fixed it, then when it wasn’t fixed, did more testing and eventually determined that they’d have to come here to check out this end of the circuit. The only problem with this was that it all was determined at 9:30 PM, and by the time that they got the dispatchers to look at the ticket, they claimed that it was too late to dispatch for a repair. (This was despite my ostensible 24/7 service contract.) So they were set up to come this afternoon, when Shannon could be here to let them in.

They came this afternoon, and within an hour, determined that another Verizon tech had stolen one of the cable pairs that makes up the T1 to use in another line. The kicker? The tech said that they’ll never be able to figure out who did it. Yep, that’s right — they know that it happened at 12:53 PM, and they know which pair was involved, but their records aren’t good enough to determine who it was that caused a 30-hour outage on a T1.

Unbe-f*#!@$%-lievable.