Our phone – the old-fashioned one that is attached to the wall – quit working last Saturday evening. No dial tone. My husband went to the AT&T website to report our problem. They said it would be fixed on Tuesday. By Tuesday evening our phone still wasn’t working so my husband called them again and they had never heard of our problem.
He was told that our phone was just off the hook. Hello? No dial tone? They say we’re not getting a dial tone because the phone is off the hook. WTF?! Have the people at AT&T forgotten everything about old-fashioned, attached-to-the-wall telephones? So anyway, they enter another trouble ticket, which, as far as they’re concerned is the first one and say that someone will be out to fix it on Thursday between 8:00 and 9:00 AM.
Thursday, of course no one shows up between 8:00 and 9:00 to fix the phone. Silly me. Why would I expect people to actually show up at the time they say they’re going to show up? How could I possibly believe in something like that? Such a silly old woman I am becoming! It’s like I still believe in service but of course “service” is not in their job descriptions anymore. Like many other companies, AT&T has renamed their customer service department, “Customer Care.” That’s appropriate. They want us to know they care about their customers but the notion of service is so old-fashioned. Lots of empty caring is the 21st century way.
So I wait… and wait… and wait… Sometime around 4:00pm my husband called them again and, after repeating that they are sure our phone is off the hook, they say someone will be there by 7:00pm. As that time approaches and no one has shown up to fix our phone husband calls again, is told, again, that our phone is off the hook but that the phone repair guys work until dark. There’s still time for them to come out and fix it. They didn’t.
I was so pissed off I couldn’t even pay attention to the lousy stuff on TV last night. My mind kept wandering back to AT&T and how I’d like to go out and find the nearest AT&T truck and kidnap them and bring them to my house and force them to do their jobs.
There was one good thing last night though. I have been reading The Line of Polity so after fooling around on Twitter for a little bit I got ready for bed and settled down for some stress relieving reading. I knew that Neal Asher wouldn’t fail me and that in just a few pages I would encounter something appropriate for my mood. And sure enough, I soon come to a fairly detailed description of one of the characters having his facial injuries treated by an “autodoc” – (“Your face looks like it’s exploded,” said Stanton. “It always fascinates me how they open you up to make even minor internal repairs.”) I was sort of hoping for a dismemberment scene but that would work. I went to sleep last night imagining everyone at AT&T who’s involved in our trouble call, plus all their managers, having similar procedures performed on them, without the benefit of anesthetics. I went to sleep with a smile on my face, I did. Thank you, Neal Asher!
And now… more waiting.
UPDATE: I probably should mention that cell phone service is extremely spotty at our house so being without the old-fashioned telephone is a serious inconvenience.
UPDATE II: Yay! It’s fixed! The guy came at sometime around noon and took only 10 minutes to fix it. It was a tiny part in the little box on the outside of the house that he said rarely goes bad. I guess I’m just special. Now I’ve got to try and come down from stressed out mode to normal chillin’ out weekend mode.
June 25th, 2010 - 10:33 am
I still remember arguing with a rival telephone company’s Customer Care department about my phone bill not being mailed to me on a regular basis. Judging from the way they treated me, one would think they were doing me a favor not sending it to me. Because doesn’t everybody pay online these days?
Perhaps. But I’m not everybody. And the fact that it took more than one phone call to establish the fact that so-and-so wanted his bill mailed on time to the right location–something most companies do as a matter of course–just gave me another reason to eventually change telephone companies.
June 25th, 2010 - 11:00 am
I once spent 6 weeks waiting for someone to show up when they said they would. I finally realized no one was going to fix my problem and called the FCC. My phone was working the next day and they called a couple of times later to make sure everything was still working OK. The government’s good for something after all.
June 25th, 2010 - 11:09 am
Ah, AT & T. Their motto should be “our service has always sucked, but our collections department will hunt you down into your grave and beyond.”
June 25th, 2010 - 12:05 pm
And: If you DARE to cancel your long-distance service with us, we will call you several times a week, begging you to come back, until you actually send a letter of complaint to the head of the company.
Seriously, AT and T was like the bad boyfriend that wouldn’t go away. The only thing it didn’t do was promise to change for me.
My brother and sister in law don’t have a land line because they got so tired of being jerked around by A T and T and by Verizon.
July 1st, 2010 - 10:51 pm
Even in other countries, the monopolistic incumbent has less than stellar service. Though it is known that they really really hate hearing from the ombudsmen about poor service. There are stories that even mentioning to the service drone that you will be contacting the ombudsmen immediately Makes Things Happen.
I’m wondering how long it will be before people are complaing to the ombudsmen about that behaviour. :-/