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blahdeblah
@adelphia.net
| Glad t hear from another satisfied customer.
As a bellsouth employee, I would like to thank you for choosing bellsouth. I won't mention My name or where I work but I am a ADSL Tech. Maybe some day I will have ADSL at my house, but right now I have a cable modem. The only difference that I can see is price (employee discount  ). My connection is 6m from what my cable company tells me but using various speed tests, the fastest
I have tested is about 2900k. Anyway, thats not why I am posting. Its seems that unions have a bad name these days. Not sure why. I know alot of companies blame all their problems on unions. BellSouth is guilty of this. They portray union members as lazy. I would venture to guess that the percentage of union members that could be considered lazy is about the same as those in management or non-union companies. The truth of the matter is that, in my case, If it were not for the union, workers would be Lucky to get paid more than minimum wage to do one of the most dangerous jobs in the country( check the statistics). You may be wondering what is so dangerous about installing ADSL. I can only speak for my area, which includes Jellico TN, but DSL installation is not the only thing I do on a daily basis. I work on and install regular phone lines to. That include climbing poles and hanging wire and clearing cable pairs all in very close proximity to high voltage power lines. Even though OSHA does do minimal policing of telephone companies, it is the union (employees) that keep the job safe. Who better to deem a rope bridge safe than the man about to walk across it. I know I am rambling, but I say all this to get to this point. The problem in bellsouth is not "lazy" union employees. From my vantage point, the problem is mainly in our engineering department (management). Basically we have a bunch of people with a certificate on the wall and no knowledge of how telephone lines work making the important decisions. They may know what a cable pair looks like on paper but that is about as far as their knowledge can take them. Bellsouth has adopted a policy of hiring management employs out of college. No longer are people with experience in the telecommunications industry promoted to positions within management. As long as one has a degree (does not matter what kind i.e. business management, home decorating, dog grooming) and is fresh out of college, they are a prime candidate for employment in bellsouth management. This leads to another minor problem that I see from my vantage point. Since ADSL was first deployed, remote sites have been placed according to where the money resides. Demand for DSL service has never been taken into account. Remote sites have most commonly been placed to feed high dollar sub-divisions. Typically, people who live in these areas are of retirement age and have no use for the service. The demand for ADSL is in the working class communities. These are mostly younger people who have grown up with or been around computers for some time. I have saw this happen more than you would like to know. And when the company does place a remote site in a lower class community by mistake, they cannot understand why the service sells so quickly that all ports are in use before another self can be added to the site. One of the state planner's (Over paid engineer) actually said to me, "How can these people afford ADSL? There is not a car there thats less than 5 years old?" Many times I have tried to explain this, and many times it has fallen on deaf ears.
I didn't realize I had this much to say. Please forgive me.One more thing, I miss the days of Client Logic, at least you guys could speak english. | |
Ron_Hermione
join:2006-05-11
Pioneer, TN
 ·AT&T Southeast
| You sure gave several points to ponder and I concede the point that perhaps I was overly harsh about some points. I think that one reason unions have a bad rap is because of union executives abusing the system and living "high on the hog" at the expense of dues paying members. Another reason, from personal experience: management too often controls the unions. A few years back I worked at Kroger and when management said jump, the union was ready to ask how high. I was the victim of "dirty pool" by a vindictive manager who had a vendetta against me for reasons that were unknown to me then and still are ten years later. As a result, I was demoted from cashier to courtesy clerk and the union did NOTHING to help me, so as a result of the bad taste that experience left in my mouth, I don't have much use for unions. The employees I was mainly referring to were billing, which were about the most useless bunch of idiots I have ever had the misfortune of having to work with. As far as employees being dedicated to their jobs and doing the best jobs they know how, you are right: the majority of you are, but a few bad apples spoil the whole barrel, unfortunately. What about all the installer appointments cancelled for no discernible reason? There were lots and lots of them, and almost all of them were correctly scheduled using published company policy, yet there were a lot of cancellations: I know because I worked the project for several months that tracked appointment cancellations and hopefully the installers improperly cancelling appointments were pinpointed and dealt with. Your right about most management types: they don't have a clue about the jobs that they are supposed to be managing, which is why a top-down management philosophy is bad for all concerned. The competent employees capable of management work their way up: the cream always rises to the top. You are certainly correct about the discriminatory nature of ADSL rollout, which is why I never held much hope that I would ever have it. As for Client Logic: I miss the people I worked with, but I'll never miss Client Logic. Client Logic seems to have fallen on hard times and I guess I really shouldn't say more. | |
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