Busy Signal vs. Fax Machine

While home in Utah last Friday, I was supposed to have carpet delivered and installed. My wife and I had picked this date 3 weeks earlier so I could be there to make sure everything went as planned. That morning my wife got a call from the installer that a family emergency had come up and we needed to reschedule. My wife let me know about the delay and I went into action fixing the wrong as we had spent weeks moving out of 3 bedrooms and ripping out the old carpet. I did not want to go another day without something we had already paid for.

I made my first call to the local store where we had purchased the carpet. It is a large chain store with many locations. I did that on purpose so that in the event that one installer had a family emergency, the company would have other installers they could call on to finish the job. The person helping me on the other end of the phone mistakenly hung up on me while trying to transfer me to her manager. Naturally I called back only to get hung up on a second time. That should have been a clue that this person did not know how to use a phone.

My next call went to the customer service department of this large store. I talked with a nice lady who eventually connected me back to the local store that I had called twice before. She routed me to the same employee that had hung up on me. This whole process didn't take long to write but actually took about 30 minutes of real time thanks to all of the automated phone systems and multiple explanations I had to make. Meanwhile the local store had tried several times to call me back but kept getting a busy signal.

With the ubiquity of call waiting and other features that come standard with our mobile phones, we don't realize that old hard-wired phone lines don't include them without extra charges. Some younger people today have never heard a busy signal and doesn't know what it sounds like. The lady at the local store kept saying she couldn't call me back because she kept getting a fax machine and didn't realize that fax machines sound nothing like a busy signal.

I probably made a mistake using an old land line instead of calling in on my mobile phone. However I called from my basement and prefer a land line down there instead of my mobile. I had to laugh about this person not knowing what a busy signal sounds like.

Ultimately I managed to resolve the issue and carpet got installed at 3pm that afternoon.