Yesterday, I think it was, a kindly AT&T customer service person appeared on this blog to invite my correspondence, offering to help me get the Internet access AT&T is apparently incapable of delivering to me. I responded by saying that I appreciated it, but that I had no confidence that she (or he) could accomplish a blooming thing. AT&T’s customer service people make promises that mean nothing. For example, I was told a day or two ago — they all start to blend, so I can’t be precise — that the agent was going to make a priority of getting my service on, given how badly we had been treated by the company. She said it would be on by day’s end, and that she would call me in an hour to verify this.

Do I even need to tell you that that promised call never came? Need I tell you further that Internet access never did either? When I called back, the customer service torturer agent told me that no one was authorized to make any promise like that. Ah. Got it. She told me that service was set to be turned on Thursday, according to “the computer.” This was Wednesday afternoon. I told her that was unacceptable, that I had to have Internet to do my job, that I had been effectively out of work all week because of AT&T’s error, and that I insisted this had to be taken care of today.

She told me that that wasn’t possible at all, because they computer says yadda yadda yadda.

At that point I barked, “YOU PEOPLE LIE!” at her. I hung up.

By last night, we still didn’t have Internet access, though I told Julie that they had five hours left in the day. I mentioned to her that someone from AT&T had come on this blog and offered to help. “Don’t!” she said. “I don’t believe a thing they say.”

“That was my thought too,” I replied.

Above is my modem this morning. Obviously there is no Internet service at my house, despite AT&T’s promise.

These people lie. I don’t think they lie in terms of telling conscious untruths. I think they lie in that they make promises that they cannot fulfill, and have no real power to fulfill. For AT&T, “customer service” is the foundational lie. I read somewhere that the definition of a corrupt institution is one that knows the right thing to do, but cannot muster the wherewithal to do it. By that standard, AT&T is corrupt.

“The problem is they’re too damn big,” my father said to me last night. “When these companies get so big, you don’t mean anything to them anymore. And the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”

I spoke yesterday to a friend who retired some years ago from AT&T  after over three decades of service. “I tell you, it’s shocking to me to see how bad the company has gone down in the years since I left it,” he said. “They used to have pride in their work. The customer always came first. Not anymore. These young people who run the company today, they don’t know what they’re doing and don’t care. There’s no work ethic anymore.”

Next week, we’ll be past Christmas, and that’s when I’ll investigate alternate Internet service providers locally, as well as start writing letters to the Louisiana Attorney General’s office, to the FCC, and to anybody else I can think of.  Oh, baby, we are just getting started. These people have pissed me off so badly that I might actually drive to their corporate headquarters, on Akard Street in downtown Dallas, and do a little Occupy AT&T action on my own. And I will Alert The Media before I hit the road. Anyone within driving distance of Dallas care to join me if I can make this happen? I’m actually serious.

AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall L. Stephenson, your page on the company website says:

Since becoming chairman, Mr. Stephenson has strengthened AT&T’s position as the world’s largest telecommunications company and as a global leader in mobile broadband and IP-based business communications services.

Not with me, you haven’t. This is another one of AT&T’s lies, in my opinion. I make my income writing for this magazine, primarily its website. You have impeded my ability to do business. We ordered broadband service from your company in November, Randall L. Stephenson. Not only have you not delivered, but you have kept me and my wife on the phone for hours this week, and your agents have misled us, lied to us, and treated us very badly. I had never had a bad thought about AT&T, but now, not quite a week later, I think your company is so badly run and indeed malicious that if Christmas weren’t coming, I’d drive to Dallas this very day and picket your building. I have never in all my life been treated so badly by a company. What kind of shop are you running there, Mr. Randall L. Stephenson?

Anyway, readers, enjoy the red and green of AT&T’s Christmas lights above.

UPDATE: I’m in Bird Man working on the wi-fi. Just talked to a friend who said that a few years back, when the local bank remodeled and relocated to temporary quarters, the move back to their original building was set for a particular day. The bank had arranged long in advance to have their phone service (AT&T, of course) switched over so they could resume business without interruption. They got to the moment, and … no phone service. They only reason the bank was able to get their phone service turned on in time to do business — and mind you, if the bank can’t do business, half the town can’t do business — was that someone here was able to get a call in to the state’s Public Service Commissioner that weekend. Can you believe?

4:30 a.m., Fidelity Street.

… but fiction-resistant me picked up a copy of  “Anna Karenina” from the bookshelf last night to have something to read in bed. Julie walked through the room, saw what I was doing, and said, “Good book,” in that tentative way that mothers speak to their child as the little one stares at a plate of green peas, contemplating whether or not to take that first-ever bite.

This morning, after pre-dawn prayers and a walk with the dog through the neighborhood, I thought, “Those first few chapters were pretty good. I’d like some more.” I fetched the book, settled down in my leather armchair by the fireplace, and started reading again. If I didn’t have to go into Baton Rouge early this morning to do Christmas shopping, there I would still be.

This is promising.

And now, before I pull away from the coffee shop parking lot and return to my Internet-less home, I want to share something brief with you, in part because I can’t wait to read the comments it sparks.

Tonight I was having coffee at the home of friends, and met a relative of theirs from out-of-state. He’s a reader of this blog, as it turns out, and works for a multinational corporation. We talked for a while about the awfulness of customer service — I tell everybody I meet these days about AT&T, and I find that nearly all of them have similar stories about AT&T’s horrible customer service — when he brought up a parallel evil afflicting the modern world: the Human Resources Department.

He told me that it seems that his company — one of the world’s wealthiest and most consequential — is run by its HR department. They issue hiring directions that are only tangentially related to the actual needs of the various departments, and nobody can figure out why they do what they do, or why no one in a position to stand up to them will do so. It is one of the mysteries of our era. I don’t think I’ve ever worked for a company whose HR department is as bad as his — and truth to tell, I’ve had helpful experiences in some HR departments I’ve deal with. But I must admit that I’ve worked at companies in which the employees, even the managers, have not been able to understand why HR does what it does, because their activities don’t seem to serve the mission of the company, nor have they understood why senior management tolerates it.

Tell us your HR horror experiences. It’s funny how “human resources” and “customer service” both have taken on Orwellian meanings, because they connote the absolute opposite of what they’re supposed to mean.

UPDATE: An HR story I shared with my interlocutor yesterday. I once worked at a company in which I was unjustly accused of a particular offense. The accusation was hysterical. My manager came to me with it because the colleague who made it used the term “hostile work environment” to describe my action. I told my manager this was absolutely ridiculous, and explained why. My manager kept a poker face, quite properly, but I am sure that my manager agreed with me. But I further told my manager that if I stood up to this bullying hysteric, the whole matter would go to Human Resources, and because as far as I could tell the prime directive of our company’s HR was to prevent lawsuits, that HR would find a way to fire me, even though I was the wronged one in this case. I didn’t have the patience to go through with it. So I swallowed my dignity and restored harmony vis-a-vis the complainant. I hated myself for doing this, but I had absolutely no faith that HR would be fair, and every confidence that it would try to head off the prospect of a Hostile Work Environment lawsuit, no matter how absurd such a thing would be.

Forgive me for not having an informed position on the payroll tax issue, but I’ve been busy moving across the country. I’ve had the news on the radio and on TV these past few days, and I cannot for the life of me understand why the House Republicans are doing what they’re doing about the payroll tax. I found myself thinking yesterday, “These people have no business governing.” But I also know that perhaps I’ve missed something in the debate. However, Ross Douthat, who has been watching and thinking about this, writes something about it that makes intuitive sense to me, and that fits what I’ve been able to follow in bits and pieces. Excerpt:

The White House’s embrace of payroll tax cut, properly understood, should be a boon to the right, since it involves a Democratic president tacitly admitting that Social Security isn’t really pay-as-you-go, that the trust fund is more a gimmick than a lockbox, and that America’s retirement system could be just as easily paid for out of general revenue rather than through a counterproductive tax on employment and work. Instead, the debate as it’s unfolded has made the Republicans look ideologically confused, politically disorganized, and loath to champion policies that directly benefit the middle class. As the overture to an election year, it’s been the poorest possible advertisement for conservative governance.

I told my wife the other day that as far as I can tell, one of the only ideological constants in the GOP as it exists today is that whatever Obama supports, they oppose. This is intelligent government, or principled government? I don’t get these people. At all.

So frazzled was Your Working Boy from his AT&T travails that he broke the Nativity fast and bought the last link of boudin at the butcher shop, and guiltily devoured it. If I go to heck because of this, you’ll know whom to blame, people.

I haven’t been able to post anything further about Hitchens because of my Internet access problems, but I’ve been reading the comments as closely as I can manage. The person who posted of Hitchens praising the Soviets because they crushed the Orthodox Church really did make me rethink my qualified esteem of the man. To me, there is scant difference between that and praising the Holocaust for taking care of the Jewish “problem.” The man was obviously as deformed by his hatred of religion as any anti-Semitic fanatic is by his hatred of the Jews. Here is what Hitchens said in a PBS interview:

One of Lenin’s great achievements, in my opinion, is to create a secular Russia. The power of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition, is probably never going to recover from what he did to it.

This gives more detail about what Hitchens praised. Barbaric. Evil. Let me be clear: I don’t begrudge Hitchens his rejection of religion, and I don’t have the reaction I will detail now because I am a Christian, or an Orthodox Christian. My jaw hits the ground because Hitchens here is justifying the mass torture, imprisonment, and state-sponsored execution of tens of thousands, probably even more, Orthodox believers, because their faith-because the outcome was a secular Russia. That is an evil that I cannot get past, and he reveals himself to be a hypocrite, inasmuch as he (correctly) denounced the evil done to leftists by the military regime in Argentina, which was trying to get rid of communism and socialism in Argentina. So, for Hitchens, terror and state murder was good when the goal is the eradication of religion, but bad when the goal was the eradication of socialism. Evil, this is.

Even though I do believe there was good in him, and that he had admirable qualities — qualities that do not cease to exist because he had despicable ones — I nevertheless regret now having written anything in his posthumous favor. Had I known this about him, I would not have been able to listen to his memoir. It’s simply beyond my human capacity to forgive. That’s the difference between God and me, I guess.

Katha Pollitt, the left-wing journalist who knew him, wrote this in remembrance. Excerpt:

That was the bad side of Christopher—the moral bully and black-and-white thinker posing as daring truth-teller. It was the side that reveled in 9/11, because now everyone would see how evil the jihadis were, and that rejoiced in the thought that the Korans of Muslim fighters would not protect them from American bullets. Some eulogists have praised him for moral consistency, but I don’t see that…

Pollitt, characteristically, seems to think that Hitchens’s worst sin was to be against abortion. Still, she’s right that he did not suffer from a lack of self-confidence, and this blinded him.

In the first of his two-part annual Sidney Awards column for 2011, David Brooks calls attention to an essay Alan Lightman wrote for Harper’s, in which Lightman, himself an MIT physicist (and, religiously, an unbeliever) said that physics and cosmology appears to have reach an insurmountable challenge. The universe is so incredibly fine-tuned for the emergence of life that the only plausible ways to explain this fact is 1) the existence of a Creator, or 2) the existence of the multiverse — that is, the existence of an infinite number of universes, which renders our life-creating one a statistical inevitability.

The problem with this is it is unprovable. Lightman:

That same uncertainty disturbs many physicists who are adjusting to the idea of the multiverse. Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.

Sound familiar? Theologians are accustomed to taking some beliefs on faith. Scientists are not. All we can do is hope that the same theories that predict the multiverse also produce many other predictions that we can test here in our own universe. But the other universes themselves will almost certainly remain a conjecture.

One way or another, you have to have faith.

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.