Bountiful woman left without phone service or answers days after her husband dies

BOUNTIFUL – When you pay for a phone service, you expect it to work. But after being unable to make or receive calls despite reaching out to the provider multiple times to fix it, a Utah woman decided it was time to Get Gephardt.

“I can’t hear anything,” says Barbara Keller of Bountiful. “All I hear is this buzz. That’s all I hear.”

Yeah, it’s a buzz, and it’s not just annoying. We confirmed, standing in Keller’s kitchen, that buzz makes it nearly impossible to communicate.

“Well, what I do is like, I yell into the phone, ‘If you can hear me, please call me on my cell, because I can’t hear you at all,’” Keller said.

She’s been dealing with this off-and-on for a year, but recently the buzz became constant — and the timing couldn’t have been worse. It hit right after Keller’s husband passed away.

“I’ve missed calls from hospice,” she said. “My husband was on hospice. There [were] health issues with him and I … just everything went wrong, and I don’t know who has called. I can’t get anything but that loud hum you hear.”

Keller says she has tried to work with her phone company, Lumen, which used to be CenturyLink.

“I’ve tried to get ahold of them since and I don’t get any response,” she said.

Sick of paying for a service she isn’t getting, Keller decided it was time to Get Gephardt.

If this story sounds familiar, maybe it’s because I’ve reported on this exact issue before. Earlier this year, Susan Wilson of Sandy called saying her line had been buzzing off-and-on for more than a decade.

In that case, Lumen replaced the line after our call. So, we called them again – this time for Keller.

A spokesperson told us they would look into it.

“Cables do age,” Lumen’s spokesperson told KSL 5 TV. “However, we work hard to maintain and investigate the lines regularly to see if repairs are needed.”

Within two days, Keller received a series of text messages stating her line had been fixed, but it hadn’t. So, we contacted CenturyLink again.

And just like that, Keller’s service was finally restored. The company also credited her bill for a month.

“It’s great,” she told us. “It’s working. I [now] have a working phone and I love my landline.”