Executive officer David Pearson said he reported a fault a day before the November 22 fire, but yesterday was still waiting for it to be fixed — that’s three weeks.

In the meantime he and other Legacy members have been using mobile phones and doing more face-to-face visiting to check on the 500 dependants including war widows and families as far as Derrinallum and Peterborough.

“It’s been a major inconvenience to us,” Mr Pearson said.

“The line link to the exchange was restored this week, but the original problem remains.

“We recognise technicians have been working hard, but our fault reports to the call centre don’t seem to be getting through.”

Meanwhile, a Mortlake district girl is blaming the phone outage for missing a job offer in Warrnambool.

Her mother told The Standard yesterday the employer had tried calling her daughter’s mobile phone several times without success.

“He said he wanted to tell her she had the job, but when she didn’t answer he gave the position to someone else,” the mother said. Aussie Broadband, which has equipment at the Warrnambool exchange, is also ironing out connection problems since the massive repair effort to get services back in action.

“We are still working on  up to 100 customers who don’t have synch with our equipment,” national sales manager Aaron O’Keeffe said. “We are doing the repairs in batches of 50.

“It’s important that customers let us know of their faults so we can fix them. Our call number is 1300 880 905.” 

One caller using the Aussie Broadband service said he was unable to contact a family member in Melbourne who was on an Optus landline.