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AT&T: Never, ever, never, ever use them

Greetings from the Bird Man Coffee Shop in downtown St. Francisville: good coffee, hot blueberry muffins, and wi-fi. We still don’t have wi-fi service at my house — this, despite having ordered it from AT&T in November. The last post I wrote here was, as you know, a somewhat detailed account of what we’ve been […]

Greetings from the Bird Man Coffee Shop in downtown St. Francisville: good coffee, hot blueberry muffins, and wi-fi. We still don’t have wi-fi service at my house — this, despite having ordered it from AT&T in November. The last post I wrote here was, as you know, a somewhat detailed account of what we’ve been through with these people, whose screw-up it was in the first place, because they confused our physical address with the landlord’s address. The mess is still going on, but they have defeated me. I realize that there is nothing I can do at this point but to submit. Yesterday, I talked to at least four different people at AT&T customer service — after this, I am incapable of hearing term “customer service” in a non-Orwellian way — the second one of which said, “Sir, I’m sorry to tell you this, but it looks like nobody ever put in your request for service.” This, after hours on the phone the previous day, talking to eight or nine different people, not a single one of whom mentioned this to us.

(It perhaps goes without saying that with each different person, we had to go through the same routine of giving basic information. If all of this was inputted — is that a word? — into their computer system, then the systems don’t talk to each other.)

Anyway, this person, “Sonya,” promised to expedite the order after I told her that my business depends on having wi-fi access, and I hadn’t been able to work all week because of their errors, and inability to fix them. She promised me she would call me back in an hour to confirm that it would be expedited, and that I would have DSL service by day’s end.

Did I get a callback? Of course not. Did I get DSL service? What do you think? So I called back, and got a person whose first language was not English. (Here’s a weird thing: sometimes I would talk with people whose accents were clearly American regional English, and other times I would talk with people who were obviously sitting in some boiler room in Asia.) This person had no idea what I was talking about. By then I was capable of saying, in a calm, level voice, that I was about to kick the door in I was so angry at the way I had been treated. He started using the standard parlez-vous customer service babble, and I said, “Listen, Joseph, this is not personal, but I’m sick and tired of being patronized by politeness. All of you are polite! I appreciate that. But I don’t want to be coddled. I just want you to fix the problem.”

This seemed to throw him off. He tried to come back with another one of those mentholated phrases, then stopped, because I had just told him I was sick and tired of hearing it. He finally said, “Er, I’m sorry, sir.”

And then he transferred me to another person, this time an American (to be clear, an African-American Southerner — Julie and I had by this time made a game of trying to figure out whether the customer service rep was American or not, and if American, whence they came). And here we went all over again, with the same basic information required. By this point, I’m thinking that I’m Sisyphus, and that Albert Camus ought to be writing my blog posts. I got to the point with her when she said, “The service is scheduled to be turned on tomorrow.”

“THAT IS NOT ACCEPTABLE!” I barked. “I need this line for my business! You people messed up, you admit you messed up, but you’ve been giving me the runaround for several days now. I’m sick and tired of it. You need to make this happen today!”

“Sir, the computer won’t let me.”

“But one of your colleagues told me it would be turned on today!”

“I don’t know who told you that, but they didn’t have the right to say that.”

“YOU PEOPLE LIE!”

“Sir” — sassy now — “I didn’t lie to you!”

I said something very ugly in a loud voice and hung up. And that’s when I knew there was no winning with these people. They were going to do what they were going to do, when they were going to do it. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on. But I could not stop thinking about the happy-voiced, benign contempt they have for their customers. It is surreal, when you think about it. Why would anybody do business this way? Julie said she’s pretty sure AT&T is the only choice for Internet service around here, but I’m not sure whether or not we can get it through the cable company. I’m going to investigate it once we’re settled in, and even if it costs me $50 more per month, I’m going to sign up for it, just so I can never, ever, ever have to deal with AT&T again.

After I got off the phone with the sassy woman, I got dressed to go over to the Methodist church for an Advent prayer service for grieving families. My mother had asked me to join them, and I was pleased to be there. Five minutes before I walked out the door, the phone rang. “AT&T” said the caller ID. I picked it up. A chirpy voice on the other end said, “Hi, this is Britney from AT&T, and this is a courtesy call that” — and then the line went dead. I think it was an act of divine mercy, both for me and for the hapless Britney, who had no idea that she had just placed a courtesy call into the lair of the cave bear.

Later, as I sat there in the pew, prayers issued forth from the pulpit and altar, but I couldn’t settle my anger and inner turmoil over AT&T. I tried praying my prayer rope. No good. I felt like a bad person: here I was amid grieving families, there to remember my dead sister, but the rage I had at this stupid company wouldn’t let go of me. I felt ashamed of myself for being so petty. I could hear my heart racing. Earlier in the day, I had been on the phone and watched my right hand tremble with anger. That had never happened to me before. I was trying to write down a phone number the customer service person was giving me, and the writing is all jagged, because I was shaking with rage.

How is it that a customer service experience from this company could have upset me so? The last time I had been in that church was September, at the funeral of my sister. Believe me, I was far, far more composed and emotionally balanced at that occasion than I was at this gentle Advent prayer service, because I could not quit thinking about AT&T. Sitting there, I really despised myself for being so petty. But this only made me hate AT&T even more, for reducing me to this ridiculous and humiliating position.

Interestingly enough, going around town this week I’ve been asked by various friends and family members how things are going. Whenever I bring up the AT&T problems, every single one of them has a similar story. I talked to my brother-in-law yesterday about his experience trying to upgrade his AT&T phone service after his wife, my sister, died. It was striking to hear the same stories of incompetence and customer mistreatment, though his involved having to spend hours at two AT&T stores far apart from each other in Baton Rouge. “The amazing thing,” he said, “is that I was trying to give them money. I wanted them to take my money, but they were making this so hard.”

Needlessly difficult. And he was dealing face-to-face, with actual human beings! So it’s not just a matter of disembodied call center automatons. There is something about the culture of this company. In any event, I cannot urge you strongly enough not to get involved with them — though to read the comments on the last thread, it seems that Verizon is no better with its customer service. Once we get past Christmas, I’m going to be filing every possible complaint I can with every appropriate state and federal agency, plus writing to the head of AT&T, plus writing to the Better Business Bureau, Consumer Reports, the FCC, and probably even the head of the FCC’s Great Aunt Dahlia.

I did get a funny story out of this from a New Orleans friend who called in sympathy after reading my last blog post. He told of a friend of his, a businessman in Alabama, who had gone through AT&T customer service hell, and finally told the umpteenth person he talked to that “if I could crawl through this phone line, I would wring the neck of the first one of you I could get my hands on.” That ended the call. A few minutes later, the man got a call from a fellow identifying himself as with AT&T security. “I hear you’ve been threatening our employees.”

The businessman said, among other things, “Do you know what it’s like to try to do business with your company?” No, said the security man, but what’s this about you threatening our customer service employee?

“I didn’t threaten anybody!” he yelled. “She threatened me! She kept saying, ‘I’m gonna axe you…’!”

“Sir, that’s just how she talks.”

“Is it?! Your employee threatened to axe me!”

The Alabama businessman obviously knew he hadn’t been threatened, but he was using whatever he had to fight back.

He eventually got a call back from the head of security, who said, “Sir, I owe you an apology. You asked me if I knew what it was like to try to do business with our company. I told you I didn’t. Now I do. You were right.”

UPDATE: Well, it’s after 7pm on the date that AT&T absolutely positively said I would have Internet service at home. There is nothing. I’m sitting in my car outside the coffee shop (which is closed) typing this. There are still about five hours left in the day, so they might come through. I don’t expect they will. If not, what the hell do I do? I can’t bear to spend five more minutes on the phone with these people. Just the thought of it is literally making my heart race as I sit here typing this. I feel like an idiot for letting this get to me so much, but … here we are. And I have to have the Internet to work.

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