So I get an e-mail from AT&T last week.

"Hello Anna," it begins, in that creepy first-name usage by complete strangers who ought to know better than to alienate the consumer base by projecting intimacy. With a chiding, passive-aggressive tone, it continues: "We haven't heard from you in a while." Then, cutting to the hyperlink, AT&T explains to me that "We certainly want to stay in touch because" the company needs to pitch a list of "new services and products" about which I couldn't care less.

I remark on AT&T's electronic epistolary style since, oddly enough, I had been in touch – for the previous six days, exactly. I had been in touch via any number of phones outside my home because my own phone was not working.

It's a tad difficult to stay in touch with the folks who want you to stay in touch with them when they are out of touch with you because the service they provide is broken and thus absolutely ineffective in keeping anybody in touch with anybody else's touch.

But this is not intended to be a rant about AT&T's deplorable, opportunistic interpersonal communication habits. It is written in praise of a local man whom I shall call Joe the Lineman.

When my landline went down and AT&T Repair Services was duly notified, I was informed that it would be a bleak and biblical six days before a repairman could be dispatched. I accepted the news with a sanguine temper, even though I have fond memories of living on a dirt road in the foothills during a pre-cell phone era when, if a home phone went out, the repair guys were there within hours of being summoned.

AT&T Repair had assured me that I need not be in situ when the repairman checked the outside lines. Returning home on the evening of the sixth day, I found a handwritten note from Joe the Lineman. Joe wrote that he had temporarily spliced something into something else, so my phone was working. He would have to return, however, to fix some other something inside the house. Graciously, Joe left me his own cell phone number and the invitation to call him with any concerns.

Woe was me: Joe's splicing had solved the landline problem but botched the Internet connection, which had been my home's sole communication with the outside world for nearly a week.

I am ashamed to say that I used my newly restored telephone to leave a rather heated message in Joe's message box. No, no expletives required deletion, but I did explain pretty clearly that if my Internet wasn't fixed by the following morning, I would be soon become a Comcast customer.

Within minutes, I received Joe's return call. It was 6:30 p.m., but Joe explained that he wouldn't leave town until he'd returned and fixed my problem. If we left it to the next day, he ruefully explained, the bean-counting AT&T muckety-muck MBAs (my translation, mildly slanted) would insist upon another repair order and I, Joe feared, would be stuck with another six-day wait. Joe would let his wife know he'd be missing his dinner. It wasn't his nature, he said, to leave a customer unhappy. He'd make this right – off the books.

Joe carried a leather tool bag with the golden patina of a well-worn saddle, and he smelled faintly, comfortingly, of cigarettes and my dog approved him without hesitation, and I had complete faith he would fix my phone and my Internet, and he did both in under an hour.

I learned that Joe had been a lineman for 12 years, that he liked his job, and that he felt he'd generally been treated well by AT&T. Except that the company had recently required its employees to begin paying $400 per month for their downgraded medical coverage. What Joe said – what many wage-earning folk echo – is that he'd understand if the company were doing poorly, if it were a matter of belt-tightening for all across the board. Then he'd do his part.

But according to Joe, the company is showing good profits. And according to Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO, Joe is right: "Despite the economic environment, we grew revenues in 2008, and I expect 2009 will be another year of overall revenue growth and solid progress for our company."

Joe is a loyal employee, the kind of guy who misses his dinner and works overtime without compensation because it's his "nature." When I thanked him profusely and gave him a root beer on ice for the road as partial payment for his missed dinner, I repeated that had he not returned, I would have called Comcast.

"Oh, please don't say that," Joe said softly, sadly.

Randall Stephenson doesn't know it and probably wouldn't care if he did, but I'm sticking with AT&T. Its ad campaigns and its corporate greed are beneath contempt, but its linemen – ordinary guys like Joe, just doing their jobs in their honorable way, day in and long day out – are worth keeping in touch.

Anna Tuttle Villegas is a writer and teacher. She lives in Lodi.