If asteroid’s coming, don’t try to call me

I had written a column for today about how Paul Martin wants to delay the election long enough to keep an asteroid from hitting Earth and wiping out Canada, and how Stephen Harper’s willing to risk Armageddon if it means he has a chance to become Prime Minister, but I have had to scrap that piece because there is some breaking news on the home front.

It has come to everyone’s attention at our house that Bell Canada is the most useless company in the history of the universe.

( If this topic does not interest you, I’m still going to do the asteroid column for my podcast, which will be up on the Star website later today. It kills me to waste anything.)

Anyway, it’s not clear to me whether Bell Canada is actively trying to win the award for Worst Customer Service Since The Dawn Of Time, or whether it’s the sort of thing they can accomplish without breaking a sweat.

For a week, our phones have all been totally wonky. Loads of static, droning background noise, a flashing message light when there are no messages, and no flashing light when there are. Sometimes, the phone rings and no one’s there. Or ( we’ve since learned) people call us but the phone here never rings.

So, nearly a week ago, I called Bell. “Can HHHHHKKKKK someone please HHHHHKKKKK fix this?” They said they’d get right on it. In a little over a week. Now, I work for a newspaper, and you’d think that if there’d been a hurricane, or a flood, or an earthquake, or an ice storm that had brought down thousands of phone lines, I’d have heard about it. Because surely, short of some sort of natural disaster, it couldn’t possibly take this long to get a phone fixed. Because if it did, how long would it take to restore phone service if there really were a natural disaster?

Bell finally agreed to come Saturday, between 9 a. m. and 6 p. m. I explained no one would be here before 1 p. m., so they said, okay, between 1 and 6 p. m.

So we made sure we were home by 1 p.m. And we waited. And waited some more. And waited a bit more after that.

At 5: 45 p. m., I phoned Bell’s repair line.

“ Uh, are they HHHHHKKKKK still HHHHHKKKKK coming HHHHHKKKKKtoday?”

Bell said, “ Oh, our HHHHHKKKKKtechnician was HHHHHKKKKKat your place at 10 a. m. and fixed HHHHHKKKKK the problem, outside.” Do Bell employees get four-, maybe five-day weekends? Because if I did, I wouldn’t mind losing an entire day of one waiting for a repair guy who was not only never going to show up, but had actually already been by and not fixed the problem but reported back to head office that he had.

But not to worry, said Bell. They could send someone out this coming Thursday. The Bell representative, who was very nice and seemed to sense that I was a bit, how shall we way, miffed, then asked if I’d be interested in buying their special “ protection plan” service. For a small monthly fee, it would guard me against high repair bills, should I have a problem, and would, no doubt, guarantee that the same kind of repair service I was getting now would be available to me 24/ 7.

I said I’d really have to think about it.

Anyway, if you too have a story you’d like to share that confirms Bell Canada’s position as the most useless company in the history of the universe, you’ll have to email it to me. We can’t promise that we’ll be able to receive calls at our house until at least Thursday. By then, it may not even matter. The asteroid may have hit. Hear Linwood Barclay’s columns online at thestar.com. Email: lbarclay@thestar.ca.