Qworst no longer?

When the NSA phone records thing broke last week, I can’t say I was surprised in the least — but the fact that Qworst Qwest decided to hold out against the NSA has brought it some positive customer feedback in a hurry.

I’ve had terrible, terrible service with Qwest, though it has gotten better over the years. When I moved to Denver it was US West, which took more than a month for the company to set up my home service — despite the fact that I called weeks before I moved to Denver. The reason? I was told by support folks that they were running a second line promotion, and all the techs were booked up. (This was back in the day when a lot of people wanted a second line for their dial-up connection, I suppose. Remember dial-up? *shudder*)

Since then I’ve had numerous headaches caused by US West/Qwest — billing snafus, missed installation dates, lousy customer service, and so forth.

I more or less expect lousy service from large corporations — when a company is as large as Qwest, the combination of bureaucracy, mismanagement, monopoly or near-monopoly ownership of a market, and poorly trained staff means that you almost no reasonable expectation of decent service.

But, this NSA thing almost makes up for all of it. The fact that the company would actually stand up for its customers’ privacy rights gives me a warm fuzzy. I hope that other companies will take a lesson from the PR boost this is giving Qwest.