Fergie's Tech Blog

Verizon: Incompetent Training or Corporate Indifference?

Scott Bradner writes on NetworkWorld:

The news story sounded awful. A Verizon operator had refused to help police find a subscriber who was missing and likely in need of medical assistance because he was behind on his bill. One of many headlines said it all: "Verizon willing to let 62-year-old man die unless cops pay $20 of his overdue bill." I have no idea what actually happened, but what interests me is that it is entirely believable that someone working for Verizon would do something like this.

It has to be hard to be a PR person for a phone company because phone companies are awfully hard to like in the best of times. The 1967 movie "President's Analyst" portrayed The Phone Company as the common enemy of all mankind. It was not much of a stretch to accept that AT&T (The Phone Company at the time in the United States) was after world domination. To many of us concerned with the future of the Internet, the picture today is not all that much different than it was in 1967.

posted by Fergie @ 5/27/2009 11:35:00 PM