Every month, like clockwork, the telephones at my office and warehouse die. As in no dial tone. As in no one can call in and no one can call out. Sometimes they are dead for a few minutes; sometimes they are dead for a week. The point is they die at least once a month, without fail.
My office is a leased space on the second floor of a school & office supply retail store. When my office phone dies, it means the phones of the store died too. Our neighbours’ phones also die at the same time, making it obvious that the problem isn’t due to a local circuitry glitch within our office or warehouse premises.
Why do the phones die? I had asked the question over and over whenever I report my phones as ‘out of order’ to PLDT, the very large telecommunications company where I subscriber my telephone services from. PLDT does not give me an answer beyond what it says is a ‘network outage.’ In my opinion, ‘network outage’ and ‘out of order’ are synonymous, therefore PLDT just parrots what I’m reporting and does not tell me the cause. The short answer is I don’t know.
PLDT seems to want to tell me the causes of my dead phones are none of my business, and so, they just tell me to ‘wait.’ They frequently tell me to wait like from 24 to 36 hours for what they call ‘service restoration.’ They sometimes give me a ticket number which I’m supposed to punch in to their portal whenever I’d like to follow up the ‘service restoration.’ And whenever I do follow up, I get the same canned text message: ‘the restoration of your service is still in progress,’ which in translation means ‘wait.’
I (and I would assume anyone who works in an office) can’t work productively without a landline phone. True, I (and just about everyone) possess smartphones which I (and just about everyone) would use in lieu of busted landline phones. Wireless services in the Philippines, however, is dismally horrible in which users suffer bad signal coverage dropped calls, and awful reception. Using the smartphone is also more costly than calling via a landline.
I have tried contacting human beings in PLDT when it looks like my telephone service won’t be restored within the day of reporting. Often, I end up talking to a chat-bot, which is a robot that responds with programmed answers. There were times I thought I was talking to a human only be realise it’s a chat-bot, when the ‘human’ kept on saying ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying’ to my questions.
I did go a few times to one of PLDT’s customer service centres, which are mostly located in shopping malls. Every time I visited, I’d find myself spending 2-3 hours waiting till a human behind a counter could talk to me. And when I did, the human would tell me to again (yes, you got it) ‘wait’ while he or she follows up via sending a message to whoever is in charge of repairs (PLDT won’t tell me who this would be nor would they provide a contact number).
We can conclude that whatever a subscriber does to expedite an urgent request for repair of dead phones is frustratingly futile. With our phones out of order, I, the school & office supply store, and my neighbours cannot receive calls from customers or clients. My business, the school & office supply store’s business, and my neighbours’ businesses suffer. Lucky us if PLDT repairs our phones quickly; poor us if it takes days.
Many impatient PLDT subscribers complain about their out-of-order telephones in social media but their rants hardly attract the attention of public news outlets or the government, specifically the Philippines’ National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), the agency supposedly tasked to tackle the quality of services of telecom companies. For all the complaints and the losses from once-a-month dying telephones, there is hardly any discussion. We can only speculate that government and media don’t want to take on PLDT because it is a very big company.
For ordinary subscribers like me, the school & office supply store, & my neighbours, the options left for us are to wait despairingly for ‘service restoration,’ and spend money on more expensive albeit poor quality smartphone services.
It’s another fact of life in doing business in the Philippines in which its so-called business-friendly environment is merely a myth.
Ellery's Essays 