Part of the “excitement” of setting up a new business is setting up all the services a typical business needs including finding an ISP. After waiting for the Comcast for a week to tell us they could not deliver cable to our fab space, and after mopping up our tears at not being able to get Verizon’s super fast speeds, we called up the folks at Speakeasy and asked them to get us up and running.

Speakeasy has a pretty automated and conscientious tracking system for the installation process. They seemed hyper-attentive so things felt pretty good. Speakeasy also has to depend on Qwest to make sure the “loop” is properly set up/in existence and on Covad for the truck roll to actually set everything up. This morning from 8am – noon I sat here waiting for them to show. By 11:53am (seven minutes before the allotted time was up) I had abandoned all hope and called Speakeasy to find out what the deal was. They had no news for me and Covad told them the technician was unreachable.

Normally in this situation I would be pretty annoyed. But there was a detail in the countless notifications of the Covad appointment that made me borderline apoplectic. Specifically, it warned that if I missed the appointment without giving them 48 hours notice they would charge me $150 penalty. I found it moderately insulting when I saw it before the appointment. Now that they were the ones missing the appointment I was out of my mind. Needless to say there’s nobody for me to really go to. The Speakeasy folks claim this is a penalty that Covad inflicts on them. The installer who didn’t show finally called me at 12:30 (without even a word of apology) asking if I’d be there as he was on his way. I had to go and arranged for him to show up at 5pm that day. When he did he explained to me that they load him up with so many appointments it makes it incredibly difficult for him to actually be on time for them.

Needless to say, I’m not getting my $150 any time soon. (That would be the penalty I impose on service companies that miss installation appointments.) The beauty of course is that not only will I not collect my cash, but there’s nobody I can complain to. The installer is just doing his difficult job. (Though you would hope that part of his job would be calling customers to warn them he’s going to be late.) The Speakeasy people blame Covad. And the Covad people are unreachable.

I have a theory that people only operate based on the data they have. Which wouldn’t be such original thinking except my companion theory is that the very data people have (on which they base those decisions) represents a tiny fraction of the actual situation, and, in fact, often is misleading given how much of the situation is not visible. If that wasn’t confusing enough, let me apply my theory to this specific situation. I believe that if the following data points were available, my situation this morning might have unfolded differently:

• The bad will earned from customers getting subpar service from a hurried technician
• The bad will earned from technicians being late for customers who already wasted 4 hours waiting
• The disenfranchisement of the technician who can’t do their best work because they don’t have the time and are always showing up to customers who are already unhappy
• The cost of hiring/training replacement technicians for the disenfranchised technicians who leave

I guarantee if it were reliable and convenient to measure these costs and put them in dollar figures they would make the $150 fines collected pale in comparison. The real cost of those fines is hidden and their the product of a company that simply doesn’t get it. If I were Speakeasy, I would demand detailed metrics on Covad’s reliability and punctuality before I agreed to such a requirement. And if I couldn’t get them to budge, I might just eat the cost rather than pass it on to customers. I bet in the long term the bad will avoided would save the company more money than the cost of the periodic fines.

BTW, even at 4 o’clock when my Speakeasy contact called me before he left for the day, Covad had officially still only told him that they didn’t know what was going on, left voice mail for the technician, and weren’t able to reach him. If I hadn’t arranged with the technician to come at the end of the day, who knows when the reschedule would have been arranged. And while I didn’t get my $150, Jackson Fish Headquarters is finally connected to the internets.