Unreliable Shaw "landlines"

When I was forced to go with Shaw, I got a "landline" phone with them as well.  I'm quite well aware that pretty much all the "landline" home phones you get these days are simply not of the same calibre and reliability as was available with telcos of the past.

Still, I didn't realize how ad it had become.

A friend called an left a message.  Shaw, as usual, did an end run around my answering machine, and, instead, I got notification of a voicemail.  That was weird, because I was definitely home when he left the message, and he called the home phone or I wouldn't have gotten the voice mail, so Shaw "landline" phones are not very reliable as phones.  (In fact, I was on one of the cell phones with another friend.  No, I don't accept that Shaw somehow is monitoring me and my calls with a completely different provider and decided not to bother me with the new call: that is completely beyond Shaw's extremely limited technical capability, as well as being pretty creepy.)  (This may also be way Shaw keeps doing an end run around my answering machine: maybe a whole *bunch* of calls are never coming in, at all.  I amy have to do some testing to see if I get *any* calls on my home phone.  Argh.)  I guess I'm just going to have to tell people that, if they really, really want to get me, *right now*, as opposed to leaving me email which I will get at some point, they will have to try all the phones and keep trying because I *do* have at least one of the phones with me at all times, although there are various reasons why I might not hear it.

Shaw got wind of this blog posting (well, I mean, I used their two Twitter accounts in posting it ...), and they wanted me to contact tech support.  So, I wasted half and hour on chat with them, and, as is usually the case, this resulted in the agent disappearing and the bot closing the connection without warning, before anything was resolved.