Hello? Hello?

Slowing revenue growth during the past year has been a primary factor in Cavalier Telephone shedding part of its work force, sources close to the Richmond-based telecommunications company say.

An employee who was laid off, who didn't want to be identified, said as many as 110 workers may lose their jobs. A television news report said the number could be as high as 200.

The laid-off employee said her job as an installation coordinator could not be automated, the primary reason the company gave for the layoffs.

"We were told in the meeting . . . that Cavalier Telephone was laying off due to the fact that 'we are not where we thought we would be at the end of the second quarter,'" she wrote in an e-mail.

Andy Lobred, vice president of marketing and product management and Cavalier's spokesman, denied all those figures in a recent interview.

"There's not 110, and there's not plans for any more," he said. Cavalier has about 1,200 employees in the mid-Atlantic; 691 of them worked in the Richmond area as of Jan. 1.

Officials said Friday that Cavalier cut about 50 jobs last week after automating work that had been done manually. The move to streamline operations and cut costs is in response to growing competition from larger telephone and cable-television companies such as Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp.

Customer service will not be affected, Cavalier said.

That last line above is the must personally disturbing, since their customer service sucks. I switched to an overpriced crappy phone service after switching to Cavalier because the folks at Cavalier were rude and dumb as a sack of hammers. I figured that if the connection was going to sound like I was shouting through a beehive, at least the customer service people should pretend they care.

One reader who also works at Cavalier - although that may have changed in the last few hours - told me of a fellow employee who was fired for taking too much doctor approved time to recover from emergency surgery. That's harsh.

It seems when Cavalier telephone picked their name, they meant the adjective instead of the noun (look it up, then you'll realize how witty that comment was).