You know a place is tiny when it doesn’t even show up on
Google maps
. Residents of Ettersburg and other itty-bitty SoHum towns, like Whitehorn and Honeydew, were starting to wonder last year if they were also invisible to Verizon, their land-line phone service provider. It took
a community uprising
over dismal service (and customer service) last fall for the phone company to promise these backwoodsers a full network upgrade, starting in the first quarter of 2010 (even though Verizon never admitted there was a problem).
Well, we’re not even through January yet, and Verizon has finished the job! Company spokesman Jon Davies today told the
Journal
via e-mail that the upgrades are complete. Verizon will be hosting a community meeting next week in Garberville to explain what-all they did and answer any questions the community may have.
Letters were reportedly sent to all the customers in the area, but if by some random chance you a) missed the letter, b) live in one of those micro-burbs, and c) happened to stumble across this here blog post, the pertinent information is as follows:
What: Verizon’s phones-is-fixed meeting
Where: VFW Hall, 483 Congers St., Garberville
When: 5 p.m., Wednesday Jan. 27
This article appears in Taking On City Hall.
Thanks for the info. Verizon actually responded to a problem. Now just watch out for all those local long distance charges!
It is on Google maps, you just have to zoom in a bit. Ettersburg school is on there. By the way, some folks in the area had so called Carlson phones for years, modified cordless phones with high-gain antennas so it would reach across a canyon, a few miles. Often solar powered. Quite popular, especially before cell phones came around, and before wireless internet. Heard yesterday: the person who recently purchased the property where some of the base stations serving the greater Ettersburg area were located just cut the wires. Didn’t wanna be a good neighbor, eh?
On the satellite view, sure — you can almost see people’s bald spots with that thing. I’m just sayin’, in the map view it doesn’t even warrant a label.
Re: the wire cutter: Wow. Sounds like a hardcore back-to-the-lander.