The planning and building process lasted three years. Verne McClelland, co-owner of Moving Solutions Inc., had decided where to put every phone jack, data line and modem port.
The project came in on budget and at least close to the completion date. McClelland planned the move for a Friday, with plans to open for business with about 100 employees on Monday morning.
It almost didn’t happen.
“Our biggest problem was Ameritech, really,” McClelland says. “They dropped the ball and almost left us without phone service.”
Technicians worked on the system Friday, but when quitting time rolled around and a wiring problem had not been solved, they simply left, saying, according to McClelland, “‘We give up. We’re not going to be able to get it done. We’ll have to come back on Monday.’”
For McClelland, that just wasn’t an option. They had the phones and places to plug them in; they just didn’t have any service.
“I’m thinking, ‘Monday we come in. We’ve got 100 people here — office people and movers — and the phone (should) be ringing and things are going to be happening, and there is no phone (system).’”
Not one to take no for answer, McClelland started calling Ameritech supervisors and kept moving up the ladder.
“At midnight, we finally got them to get a tech out of bed to go over to one of the substations to fix their wiring problem,” he recalls. “And by three o’clock in the morning, we had some person on a computer terminal in Michigan tie into our lines and make the transfer of the lines from our old building to our new building, which is strictly a data entry kind of a thing.”
But it almost didn’t happen that way.
“They weren’t going to do it,” McClelland recalls. “Had I gone on vacation thinking I was going to come back to my new building on Monday with phones, it wouldn’t have happened, if I hadn’t sat here and insisted that it be corrected. It was a traumatic event.”
McClelland’s lesson: Even the best laid plans … well, you get the picture.
How to reach: Moving Solutions Inc., (440) 946-9300
Daniel G. Jacobs ([email protected]) is senior editor of SBN.