This morning I received an automated call from Qwest, my landline provider — why I have a landline is a different post.

See, on Tuesday my neighbors had two plum trees cut down in their front yard. In the act of cutting them down, our phone line was damaged and we lost phone service.

That evening, Jennifer called Qwest on her mobile and they told her they can come out and fix it Friday. A little slow, but we can survive via cell, email, IM, FB, Twitter DM, semaphore, etc.

On Friday, Qwest arrived promptly at the time allotted, repaired the line and departed without even stepping inside the house. Jennifer came  home from work, I came home from work, and now the phone worked.

Back to this morning’s phone call . . .  around 10:30 the phone rang, and by “the phone,” I mean not a mobile phone. I picked up the handset in the kitchen, one of three handsets connected to the land line.  A  pleasant automated voice from Qwest greeted me and confirmed that they had been to the house “on Friday  . . . July . . . 23 . . . 2010 . . .” and that phone service had been restored . The voice then proceeded to notify me, in the case that my service had not been restored  I should press “2.”

Now imagine the 30th floor of a building in downtown Denver and a group of Qwest executives are discussing business performance metrics  . . .  The lead in charge of service and support flips to the next PowerPoint slide and shows the volume of service calls for July. Imagine his next words . . . “I’m pleased to share with this group that 100% of reported problems were resolved on the first visit and we had zero service call-backs or complaints reported through our automated, post-incident follow-up.”