The letter below resulted from my attempt to contact My "rep", Mr. Valenti, at the PUC after yet another outage on my line that occurred on September 17, 1997 (only a few months after I had switched to AT&T). This time I had unequivocal proof that it was caused by cable failure, a point which Pac Bell had so often denied, and it was important to me to present this to the PUC.

I spoke with Betty Brandon when Mr. Valenti's phone number rolled over to her. When I told her why I'd called, she said she had a letter there in which Pacific Bell had confirmed that the July 26 outage was due to cable failure (I had not been told about this letter before). I asked if I could have a copy of the letter and she said no, that she had to reword it and write to me herself. Below is the letter she wrote.

However, even though confirming the cable failure, Pacific Bell had nevertheless misrepresented the events of July–August 1996, and the PUC had apparently accepted Pac Bell's version of the story without checking into it (see letter below, second paragraph). If they had checked, they would have found the following:

All incidents described the Sept. 22 PUC letter as Pacific Bell's response were part of one larger incident. I reported the outage on July 27 (I am amazed they even admit it was due to cable failure here), but no one was dispatched to fix it at all until July 29, at which time a person not qualified to make the repair came.

The cable splicer mentioned in paragraph three was Mary Norwood, who finally arrived and repaired the cable on August 3, nine days later! Pacific Bell manager Linda Standon had confirmed as much in her 11-22-96 letter to me. How soon they forget! Of course, Pacific Bell neglected to mention any of the other outages and chronic problems with my lines and their cables.