“I can walk outside of this building and touch FairPoint, and they were telling me back in February that they couldn’t find my building!”

It takes a special kind of incompetence to run a telephone company into the ground and allow customers to achieve a level of exasperation unparalleled in history.  Well beyond a month after the “transfer” from Verizon to FairPoint, the company was literally tearing up the fabric of New England business customers, unable to obtain telephone service despite weeks of trying, as WCAX discovered up in White River Junction, Vermont:

[flv width=”368″ height=”208″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCAX Burlington Problems Continue for Some 3-15-09.flv[/flv]

Nearly a month without e-mail, Internet service interruptions, and six week waits before a repair or installation truck bothers to show up in your driveway.  Life under FairPoint this past spring was hardly a picnic.  Comcast ran a veritable festival of advertising telling customers there was an alternative, and where cable was available, they did a good business picking up customers fleeing FairPoint’s nightmarish service.

Up in Maine, business customers arriving for work started to discover their phone lines had been disconnected without warning, potentially costing them thousands in dollars of lost business when customers dialing their numbers heard “this number has been disconnected” in response.

How could this happen?  WCSH in Portland finds out:

[flv width=”480″ height=”360″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCSH Portland FairPoint Business Customers Angry 02-13-09.flv[/flv]

“You’re on hold for infinity.”  Over a month after the transfer of service, customers couldn’t get virtually anything from FairPoint.  Dr. Jon Bryan, a university professor, compared FairPoint with a third world phone company.  He waited more than 25 hours on hold before being able to reach a representative, as WMUR reports:

[flv width=”480″ height=”360″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WMUR Manchester Fairpoint Customers Report Problems With Phone Service 3-10-09.flv[/flv]

The Excuse-o-Matic damage control response from FairPoint was more or less the same empty promises over and over again.  Telling customers “they were warned” is hardly adequate.  WMUR found one customer still waiting for a service call set up for January 23rd still not fulfilled by March 5th.  In Rochester, one customer reported essentially unusable phone and Internet service for more than a month.

[flv width=”480″ height=”360″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WMUR Manchester Customers Continue To Report Problems With Fairpoint 3-13-09.flv[/flv]