Landes: She loses her job after uprooting a fiber optic cable

The explanation for this breakdown lies a few kilometers by car from where Laurie Mathe lives. The young woman shows photos of a wooden pole carrying a fiber optic cable. This is cut at the bottom, like the cable, stripped. All that remains on site is a fragile piece of wood glued to a newly installed metal pole. The cable didn’t move, still severed.

“They first explained to me that I would not have internet for a week. Two technicians from Orange explained the reason for the glitch and told me that their company would do the wiring for free. The Orange company is in fact the infrastructure manager responsible for installing the fiber optic passage for part of the town of Saint-Avit and the houses on the Allée du Cyrano, as can be seen in the Arcep deployment plan (Electronic Communications Regulatory Authority, mail and press dispatch).

Operators without solutions

So the young woman contacted Orange. “A man told me it was four to six weeks and they had no vision,” she says, annoyed. She explains that she contacted Free’s customer service “about fifteen times” who only offered her a two-year free phone plan, which was turned down because it didn’t allow her to use the CRM (customer relationship management) to use. his employer.

“The only neighbor of the housing estate who still has internet is ADSL”

Free opened an incident ticket that was closed on June 28 after a technician called Laurie Mathe “to tell me it wasn’t going to happen as the incident was external.” The mayor of Saint-Avit, Michel Garcia, who was contacted, confirms that he has joined Orange “with no further results”. Eighteen households would be affected. Cracked between despair and malice, Laurie Mathe laughs as she says “the only neighbor in the subdivision that has internet is still ADSL”.

A probationary period ended prematurely

The story could end there. But Laurie Mathe has lost her job while she can only work from home due to health reasons. “I was initially given a week to find the internet because I couldn’t work without a connection. I started again but working with 4G connection sharing when you have to make 130 calls a day going through a CRM on the web like the rest of the ecosystem of my work with time tracking, team skype meetings, c is impossible . All the more so when rural areas are not best served by the 4G network. Then the ax falls. “My manager said to me, ‘You’re not being efficient enough, at this point we don’t know when you’ll get the internet back, so we’re ending your probationary period.'”

However, the rent and the bills don’t wait. And more than a month later, Laurie Mathe is still not connected. She has found a job that she will start on August 8th. “It will be the same story if I don’t get the internet back by then. »

Contacted by Sud Ouest on July 27, Orange says it acted a month earlier. “We support the network in this collective disruption. Since this large cable was damaged, we had to recommend one. Due to the lack of components and raw materials, due to the war in Ukraine and Covid, the minimum delivery time is thirty days. A partner will usually perform the operation around August 3 or a little later.