Mike Sandman... Chicago's Telecom Expert  630-980-7710

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The phone works better for technical problems, since I would have so many questions that the email exchange would be painful. 630-980-7710

Please note that when I reply to an email, sometimes the person is using "graylisting" or a "challenge / response" system which is a moronic idea that sends an email back to the person sending it, asking them to send another email in order for them to receive it.  If you use graylisting or challenge response, don't bother to send us email.  I'll never see your message telling us to send you another email since it will automatically go into the junk pile. It's very difficult to wade through the hundred or so real emails I get a day, without the extra emails.

Spam has made email unusable for business communications.

As you can see from our spam service control panel, spam is destroying the usefulness of email. Maybe half a dozen spammers get through to me a day, and a few get caught as spam that aren't spam a week.

If you have a technical question, you're probably better off calling during business hours. It's hard to figure out a technical problem in an email (or a dozen emails up and back). If you're just emailing me to ask whether I think AT&T or Verizon are jerks, that's a quick one. For technical problems, we always have lots of questions, and answers are definitely not all black and white. Much easier to do in a phone conversation.

If you call me, I'm just going to ask you what's happening starting from the beginning of the equipment. If you had a problem with a station on a phone system, I'd ask you where the CO lines are coming from (what company, POTS, T1, VoIP, provider, etc.), make and model of phone system, make and model of phones, kind of cable and sub frames (IDFs), if there's a battery backup, if the system is grounded, when the problem started (what changed at about the same time as the problem started occuring), what troubleshooting steps you've taken so far (swapped station ports, swapped phones, swapped pairs, etc.), and hopefully give you a guess at what's wrong or tell you what else you have to check. If I was on the service call, these are the things I'd have to get into my head in order to figure out how to solve the problem (when troubleshooting, starting at the beginning is the secret of a being a good repairman - of anything).

Before calling me about a phone line problem, please be sure to ask your customer if they made any changes to their phone lines recently. Customers often don't mention to the repairman that they just changed to a cheaper phone company to save money (which your service call will eat up quickly), like the local cable provider, CLEC or VoIP.

Before you call or email us with a technical question, you might want to refer to our Technical Bulletins. Since I can only repeat the same technical answer so many times a day, and some of this stuff is pretty complicated, the bulletins will give you comprehensive answers to difficult problems with phone stuff. They will tell you the same things to check for that I would tell you on the phone. Once you check those things and take readings (the same thing I would do if I was on the service call), it will be easier for me to figure out what's going on over the phone (I don't have ESP with phones).  If this was easy, anybody could do it!

We're open from 8:30AM to 5PM, Monday through Friday, Chicago time (except major holidays). We normally answer emails pretty quickly (even when we're closed), but you should call with anything that's time sensitive. Note that our spam filtering service could eat your emails, particularly with no subject or a subject like "Hi."

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