It was Wednesday morning when our DSL suddenly disconnected. Then, I noticed… the LED indicator for “DSL” of our DSL modem was not lit. I suspected immediately that the DSL service was down… but wait, I lifted the telephone and to my surprise, there was no dial tone too! How could this happen?!
I told my father to report to 173 as soon as possible. I badly needed the internet to finish my work… then before I could even go back home from school, my father informed me that the dial tone has been not restored yet. It was already late afternoon. I called 173 on my way back home. The automated telephone service prompted me to one of PLDT customer service representatives. The PLDT customer service representative was chatting with her colleague when I was connected to her line, and she didn’t realize I’m already online. I listened for a moment, waiting for the representative to take notice of my presence on the line. (Isn’t it really idiotic to always turn the mic on?) Geezzz… after a while, the representative had come back to earth and responded to my call. Of course, as a typical customer service representative, she had promised to let the repair crew know of the present situation. I hope she really did.
I learned at home that the PLDT telephone cables were actually cut by thieves so most blocks of our subdivision did not have telephone and internet services. The scrap cables and wirings that the thieves took are profitable because the wirings are gold plated, as one of the repair crew confessed. It has been their problem ever since the oppressed community learned these facts. People want to turn these scrap cables and wirings into cash by selling them in junk shops. Easy money, eh? It didn’t happen once. In fact, they told me that it happened the 6th times already. Someone has already pointed who the culprit is, but there is no concrete evidence so the people cannot just point fingers. On the contrary, I asked the repair crew why this kind of incidents cannot be prevented easily… they told me that PLDT has no direct responsibility to watch every cablings they install, so the community should help them catch these thieves in order to protect the services offered to our community.
The next day, I had to check my emails badly; I went to my gf’s house shamelessly to use her computer. I had no better choice. The dial tone was not yet back but I received good news from our neighbor — the wires were already set. The repair crew just needed a little more time to replace the wires.
At last, on the 3rd day, our dial tone was restored and our DSL was finally operational. I thought that the repair will stretch between 1 - 4 weeks. I’m thankful that the worse case didn’t happen.
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