By the time Tammy Paschke and her husband, Ned, can expect to get a refund for a Fiji Airways flight, it will have been two years since she made the reservations.
Cyclone Harold's powerful wind and heavy rain blasted Fiji as it made landfall on April 7.
Or they could find a way to redeem the flight’s $3,413.02 value sometime this year by going through the not-inconsequential hassle of arranging a multistage journey to the South Pacific just as the world inches toward herd immunity.
SOS: Washington lawsuit settled, ticket-buyers promised refunds; plus TDS canceled
SOS: Readers flummoxed by flooring, floor model and phone service billing
SOS: Cher fans get shaft from third-party ticket sellers
SOS' long history with Frontier Communications
SOS: Mother's Day comes really late for Madison woman
Five days after the start of Hanukkah, Maureen Sorensen let SOS know she was still hoping for her long-overdue Mother’s Day gift from Verizon.
With SOS playing a kind of not-so-secret Santa, the gift arrived mid-Kwanzaa, and she was able to celebrate New Year’s Day with the promise of more than $500.
SOS: Cottage Grove couple gets credit for phone company no-shows
Sure, Frontier Communications was willing to waive charges for the two weeks a Cottage Grove couple was without telephone and internet service. But what about the three half-days one of them had to take off work to wait for a Frontier repair technician who didn’t show up?
For that, there was initially to be no similarly corresponding recompense.
SOS: 2-month, 5-letter quest to correct TV bill ends in one phone call
SOS: Veteran gets what's coming to him — from Amazon
SOS: Bogus charges and canceled services end in partial refund for telecom customer
SOS: Trio of solutions amounts to $377.99 for readers
Pat and Rick Steimel thought $177.53 was a little steep for one day of DirecTV satellite television. Ivy Yttri thought she shouldn’t have to pay Frontier Communications extra for reliable internet service. And Ken Schuman struggled to understand why he was charged different amounts for the same procedure at the same facility three months apart.
All of which would likely have amounted to a hill of beans without an assist from SOS.
SOS: Bills were never ending. The channels? Not so much
SOS: Madison woman promised scooter fix
SOS: Finally, a hello to Facebook, a goodbye to Frontier Communications
This week, problems solved from opposite ends of communications history:
About 2.7 billion people are on Facebook. Still, for a company whose profits depend on monetizing as much user data as possible, you’d think it would want to make becoming a user easy.
SOS records its first twofer: Another canceled-flight recompense runaround
SOS: Don't sit down for this one: Refund promised for saggy sectional
SOS: Life's not so good with refrigerator that won't stay cold
For the better part of two centuries, our journalists have worked tirelessly to bring our readers the most important news of the day. We’re here to serve the community. We’re here to serve you.
Meet the Madison area's Top Workplaces in 2020
Madison’s strong economy, marked by its diversity, workforce and historically low unemployment, is a fertile seedbed for new-company innovation and place for well-established businesses to thrive.
Who determines Top Workplaces? The best judges: the employees who work there.
Engaged leadership, a culture of building employee skills and a commitment to helping members boosted Summit Credit Union to the top spot among large firms in this year’s Top Workplaces project.
Working in a convenience store isn’t always seen as desirable, but Kwik Trip officials say their employee benefits and choosiness in hiring have helped redefine that image for the 680-store chain.
EVCO Plastics, a third-generation family company, believes that the power of technology is unleashed by the right human touch.
In 1969, when LeRoy Carlson started what today is TDS Telecommunications, he was a believer in investing in employees – a value that company officials say continues as the firm enters its 51st year.
The Waunakee Community School District draws its identity and its workplace culture from the community it serves.
Tri-North Builders Inc. was founded in Madison in 1981 as a general contracting firm and has continuously expanded services to offer pre-construction, general construction, construction management, design-build, independent cost estimating and green-building consulting services.
Finding qualified, talented employees is a tough job in a low-employment landscape such as Madison’s – but keeping them is also a major challenge that cuts to the heart of a workplace’s culture.
Taking care of the caregivers is one of the ways that Senior Helpers built a culture of compassion among its 160 employees.
The first job at Fairway Independent Mortgage is humility.
Amtelco, a 44-year-old family-owned company, builds its corporate culture on a foundation of treating its employees, its customers and its community like family.
When The Douglas Stewart Company took on a demanding new contract last year, everybody chipped in by working long hours and weekends – including its executives and their families.
NO. 5 MIDSIZE | FIRST CHOICE DENTAL GROUP Workplace flexibility, employee support boost patient care
Kevin Klagos has a simple formula for success in dentistry: Take care of your employees and they will reflect that same care with their patients.
Widen Enterprises Inc. builds software that empowers organizations to create compelling, meaningful and measurable digital experiences.
From groceries to financial services, the midsize company category generated a range of highly ranked firms, whose dynamic approach to workplace culture earned them a spot in Top Workplaces.
KL Engineering provides civil engineering services built around a specialization in transportation engineering.
The companies recognized in the Wisconsin State Journal’s Top Workplaces project this year possess not only vibrant workplace cultures, but interesting histories, practices and approaches to community service.
Dan Fitzgerald believes that enabling employees to make decisions – and learn from mistakes – drives the culture at Horizon Develop Build Manage, providing the underpinning of a Top Workplace.
Keeping creative minds engaged at the brand-building firm Shine United involves both empowering and rewarding employees.
Feeding employees’ ambitions to change a company and an industry, trust and fair compensation are the foundation of the culture at Abodo, an online rental marketplace with a national reach.
Propeller Health emerged from a year of change with its employee culture intact and, company officials say, even stronger.
A few years back, Andy Kurth shifted his focus at Weed Man Lawn Care from being solely money driven to one of helping his employees succeed and thrive.
Here are the rest of the top-ranked small firms in Top Workplaces 2020, reflecting a diversity in business types and workplace cultures that have added up to success in their respective areas.
Although all of the organizations recognized in this section have earned distinction as Top Workplaces for 2020, employees at some of them felt so strongly in certain respects that their companies were singled out for special awards.
When it comes to feeling appreciated at work, what matters most to employees? If you answered “pay,” think again. Research shows pay is low on the list.
SOS: Frontier phone problems familiar to SOS readers
The silence coming from a rural Dodgeville couple’s landline — chronicled in this space last month — rang a bell with a trio of SOS readers.
Now a month later, all four Frontier Communications customers have, or are on their way to having, phones they can actually use.
SOS: Landline was priority for rural Dodgeville couple, if not necessarily for Frontier
SOS: Veteran gets Amazon Prime relief after being denied discount
SOS: Two telecoms, two problems, two solutions
Eileen Koch’s billing dispute with Frontier Communications was into its sixth month, and Landon Frenz couldn’t get Charter Communications to take back a piece of equipment he said didn’t work with his TV.
But just before Halloween, both were treated to the news that SOS had helped them break through the bureaucratic barriers that seem to so often befuddle the customers of big telecom.
SOS: Landline was priority for rural Dodgeville couple, if not necessarily for Frontier
SOS: Sprint customer finally leaves outdated technology in the past
SOS: H&R Block 'revisits' tax preparation that turned refund into bill from IRS
SOS: Landline was priority for rural Dodgeville couple, if not necessarily for Frontier
Michael and Janet Feehan do not live in the bustling metropolis of, say, Chicago or Madison or even Dodgeville.
So unlike their urban brethren, they do not enjoy the kind of cell tower coverage that would allow them to rely solely on their smartphones — a reality that, for more than a month, Frontier Communications did not seem to fully appreciate.
SOS: H&R Block 'revisits' tax preparation that turned refund into bill from IRS
SOS: Sprint customer finally leaves outdated technology in the past
SOS: Frontier calls off collections, promises refund
The latest installment in the ongoing saga of Customer Service in the Telecommunications Industry comes from Donna and Alan Matts, of Oregon:
The Matts, who are in their early 70s, emailed SOS on July 23 to detail their three-months-long back-and-forth with Frontier Communications that started with their decision to switch to TDS for telephone, internet and television service — known in industry marketing lingo as “the bundle.”
SOS: Price made right for Beaver Dam man; dial tone returns for Lodi couple
A week ago, Larry Krueger couldn’t get the right price for his satellite TV service, and Lora and Richard Brumm didn’t have a working landline telephone.
Less than two days later, the three got what they needed.
SOS: Phone back, satellite equipment gone, and no trip to roof for 73-year-old
Frontier Communications didn’t expect 73-year-old Carol Hall to get up onto her roof in the middle of a Wisconsin winter.
She said the company did, however, fail to show up for two appointments to retrieve a piece of its equipment from up there before demanding she pay hundreds of dollars for the device and canceling the landline phone service she’d had for 50 years.
