Protest letter to president of Qwest

I do not often send off a letter by snail-mail, but day before yesterday I sent one off the the president of the mega-corporation from which we get our telephone service and DSL internet. The points made may be of general interest, as I am sure I am not the only person who has had trouble communicating with a corporation. (It is ironic that Qwest's very business is communications.) The letter follows:

Mr. Ed Mueller, President

Qwest

1801 California Street

Denver, Colorado 80202

Dear Mr. Mueller:

We do our phone service and DSL internet through Qwest. Last week, for a whole week our DSL service was not right. For three or four days it was on again, off again, and then for four days it was totally off. Refusing to consider the days of spotty service, your business office this morning gave me a $3.74 rebate for the four days of no service despite my suggestion that it should be for the whole month since we suffered the inconvenience and cost of driving to check our email on other people’s wifi.

My main complaint, however, is with the difficulty I had communicating with Qwest and finding out what was going on. At first, your reps (in the Philippines!) insisted everything was ok at Qwest and said we should take it up with proaxis.com, our ISP. Then they grudgingly admitted it was Qwest and said it was being taken care of. Later they said a new piece of equipment needed to be ordered (and apparently hadn’t heard of air freight). They finally told us it would be fixed within 24 hours, but it was actually more than 72 hours. A lot of other people were affected, apparently, and apparently it was local to Corvallis, Oregon, but nobody would or could tell us how to talk with some responsible person in Corvallis to find out what was really happening. There are no local phone numbers or addresses for Qwest in our local phone book.

We hear much talk about banks that are too big to fail. I wonder if Qwest has gotten too big to succeed.

Sincerely,

Paul deLespinasse