Rainman I feel your pain! Maybe you seen my first post that I work for the cable company too. We have had phone for a few years now. Which puts us in a utilites company category. Which like you said. When services go down we go out and repair, no matter what. When we were cable only we could wait till we could get to it. Now if there are 2 house's on the same street or node that are without phone service it is considered an "outage" now. I guess you get to deal with the ice on the lines. Where we deal with the heat and the stretching of the lines when they get hot which pulls pins out of the LE, Node, etc...
Cool to see another "wood walker" on here. For you that dont know the term thats us guys that climb poles!!!