"Communism is like one big phone company"

When Lenny Bruce said that he was living in the age of the ATT monopoly. Of course I would reverse the quote: "The Phone Company is like one big Communist country!" I spent 13.5 years at USWest (1983-1997), now a part of Qwest. I watched the company slowly strip away any sense of customer focus. Never have I seen a company go to such brain-dead lengths to destroy it's own credibility. Never have I seen a company make such a concerted effort to drive customers away...oopppss, local monopoly...how easy it is to forget. Of course when you consider that even Qwest hated the leadership at USWest, it's easy to see how it all happened.

A close friend of mine; who spent over 18 years at The Phone Company "TPC" (he started building Intranet projects back in 1994, and was later told to quit wasting his time on that stuff), tells an interesting story. He was involved in the budget process for capital plant (central offices, switches, cable, terminals - the stuff that makes it all work to your house or business). Set the way-back machine to 1985-1988 and Pacific Northwest Bell (PNB - one of the three companies that made up USWest).

At the time PNB was involved in a massive project to upgrade all of it's switching centers (Central Offices) to modern electronic, or digital equipment. This massive project was called "Project Avalanche." It was the three year effort to jump start the company by allowing modern products and services to be sold to all of it's customers, rather than just those in the main metropolitan cities. It meant that by the end even the 72 lines in Starbuck Washington would have most of the modern services available.

At the time, there were areas that you were lucky just to have touchtone. If you were a business in Bellingham (pop 50,000 at the time 10,000 of whom were college students), and you wanted two 'hunting' lines (or roll-over lines), you had to have sequential numbers like 555-1212, and 555-1213. With this upgrade it no longer mattered what the numbers were. Things like Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, Touchtone, Speed Dialing and more would all be available. As a "Service Rep" I was excited at the time, because it meant that I could sell more "Centraflex" (a package that we were rewarded for selling, selling those was how I bought my first VCR).

In order to afford "Project Avalanche", the company had to cut other corners. In the meetings Bill attended, it was agreed that the company would slash it's budget for Outside Plant (cable, terminals, etc.), and instead put all the money into Inside Plant (Central Offices, Switches). It was also agreed that at the end of Project Avalanche there would be a similar 'Project' to update Outside Plant.

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum...

At the time of the breakup of ATT, there were three independent companies that made up USWest: Pacific Northwest Bell, Mountain Bell, and Northwestern Bell. It was an RBOC (Regional Bell Operating Company...we had acronyms for everything), that was spread out over 14 states. Of the three the only one to regularly meet it's financial commitments was PNB. Mountain Bell had a rep as a company that was top heavy and very, very bureaucratic, but it made up a little more than 50% the combined company.

USWest was located in Englewood Colorado, just outside of Denver. Denver...a nice place to visit, but an oil town that's had pretensions of being a Texas boomtown. In 1988 USWest formed USWest Communications out of the three companies and stacked the leadership with people from Mountain and Northwestern. It proved to be a huge, huge mistake.

Back in PNB territory we were heading down to the finish line for "Project Avalanche." What we didn't know was that our world was about to be turned upside down. With the new companies arrival we lost the much beloved Andy Smith, who had led the company for years. We also saw the death of Outside Plant. Remember that agreement to fund a "Project" to upgrade Outside Plant...it died. It died because USWest had it's eye on sexy things like Cellular, Real Estate (which it later got out of at a huge loss), Cable (interactive TV), and more. It was stretching the bounds and pouring money into outside ventures.

The net result of the failure to put money into Outside Plant was a shortfall in wire to provide service to new businesses and homes. Customers were left waiting in some cases for a year or more for phone service. The company was forced at one point to start providing mobile phones to people without service for more than 60 days. It was ugly, as we watched the company playing games to satisfy the Utility Commissions, but not always the customers.

The customers lost in the process. The other losers were the employees. We watched as numbers became the only game in town. We watched as the company lurched from one mess to another. We watched the company manipulate numbers to satisfy objectives that were meaningless. The company became more, and more hostile to both its customers and its employees. In the end, the Communication Workers of America supported the buy-out by Qwest. Not because it was a great deal (Global Crossings was the other choice), but because they figured that anything would be better than the inept leadership of Sol Trujillo, then head of USWest.

They were wrong. Under Trujillo things had gotten bad. Remember my job as a Service Representative? The job title changed to Sales Consultant, and service went out the door. Delayed Orders, Held Orders (or P102 as we called them) became a crisis. The Utility Commissions fined the company a lot of money, and customer complaints rose to new heights. Quick solutions were found to solve some of the problems. The funny thing is that those solutions were to cause many people to later not be able to get DSL service.

We won't even talk about the 1995 effort to Re-engineer USWest...talk about disasters...but that's a rant for a different day. Of course, under Joseph Nacchio (CEO of Qwest), things would only get worse...mj