Today was an interesting day of developments in reaction to my Open Letter to Island Tel.

First came a call from the ever-helpful Island Tel salesguy, Kevin Lewis. Kevin made it clear that people inside The Company were reading the letter, and that there was a “team working on a response”. A team! Who would have ever thought.

Oddly, given everything else that I said, Kevin’s primary reason for calling was to get some information on the chronology and specifics of the Island Tel Advanced Solutions DNS outage that I made passing reference to in the letter.

The second call came from Chris Keevill, who is the new head of something called Aliant Broadband, which appears to be something so new the Aliant website makes no mention of it (for those just joining us, Aliant is the Atlantic arm of the Bell Canada empire, formed by the marriage of the regional telephone companies).

Much to my surprise, Mr. Keevill had actually read the Open Letter, and was able to quote passages from it (this is a Good Sign). While short on specifics, he did seem to be of an attitude more conducive to bringing about some changes at The Company (or rather The Company). He seemed more like a “regular guy” than most telco management types, and seemed to understand and speak more in common sense language than in telco-speak.

When I told him that my Big Problem was that every time I brought some technical issue or another up with Island Tel I was made to feel like an idiot, he did offer (I’m not sure if this was a formal corporate offer or not) that I wasn’t an idiot. That would seem to be a Good Sign as well.

Apparently Mr. Keevill has his team working on many of the problems I brought up, and he plans to circulate The Letter to team members.

So there are two teams working on, well, something. And I may not officially be an idiot in the eyes of Island Tel. Stay tuned for Chapter Two.