🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1992Aug17.010040.23522@nwnexus.WA.COM> wendor@halcyon.com writes:

>I don't know about any of you out there, but I am really fed up
>with Bruce King and the way he runs Seattle Online (polari).

>And now today I find that ALL of polari's data lines and the voice line
>have been disconnected.

I won't comment on any of your other comments regarding polari.
However, regarding the data lines, it is likely to be a phone company
error.  I received a panicked call from a sysop of another public access
Unix site that had all their lines 'accidentally' disconnected today.  I
didn't give it more than a passing thought at the time, but now that I
find out polari has suffered the same fate, well, it's just obvious that
the phone company is involved in a conspiracy to eliminate the
competition as it moves into it's new role as an 'information provider'
:-) :-)

>If this is a temporary problem then I would
>have thought that Bruce would have been professional enough (laugh!)
>to have notified his customers (by voice if necessary). 

Uh, that really is a laugh!  I have seen bruceki claim 3000 users.  Even
if that is an exaggeration by a factor of TEN, that would mean 300
users.  Would *you* like to try and call 300 users one day because there
was a temporary interruption of service?  Don't forget, many of them
won't have answering machines, which means either calling two phone #s
(home and work), calling them back, or even both, when you don't get
them on the first try.  I don't think the $25 or $35 per month that
bruceki charges for his service pays for that kind of personal
attention.  Compuserve and/or UUnet charge many-MANY times that amount,
and you won't see *them* calling subscribers if there is an interruption
in service!

-- 
del AKA Erik Lindberg                             uunet!pilchuck!fnx!del
                          Who is John Galt?

Kevin at U dub

  For general consumption, we're going to be back online at the regular
dialup numbers sometime wednesday.  The delay in getting back online is
due to the phone companies's inability to restore the lines sooner.  

  This is the slow time of year for online systems; to cut costs I asked
the phone company to trim the number of incoming lines we have.  They
trimmed the lines from the beginning of the ringdown list and not the end.

  We currently charge $11 a month for access; $11 a month is not a price
point that allows personalized service of any sort.  Please consider that
if each phone call took 1 minute to complete, it would be more than 
24 hours before we could call every one of the users, and that's assuming
that we called each one only once, and that we talked for a minute or 
less.  Asking for a phone call is ridiculous. 

 I'm sorry for the interrupted service.  If you aren't happy with my
price point or service I'd suggest that you try other systems; that's
a fair point in any competitive situation, and if they're doing the
job better, more power to them.  At this point I have received over
500 phone calls over the last 5 days from irate folks, and frankly,
for the few cents a day profit that I make per customer it's just not 
worth the hassle.  

  We will be back online at the same numbers as before, with the same
high speed modems and you will find no changes.  We are receiving and
sending mail and news as before, and the system's been up and operational
the entire time.  

  Bruce King