So my last post was my 247th, a momentous and significant number for me and for all my fellow Pomona alums. Huzzah!
Anywho, the saga of the ineptitude that is AT&T continues. When we last left them, our fearful family of heroes had finally gotten a refund for the ill-fated iPhone (except for $.01 which they couldn't figure out how to refund, so I have a charge for one cent on my credit card now....) and had picked up the wanted iPhone. However, that phone didn't work as, umm, a phone for three whole days, during which the husband was on the phone with tech and customer support for several hours at a time, several times. Eventually, he had to return to the AT&T store in person and get it straightened out, which took another hour. But hey, at least he could make calls now!! Quite a coup on a PHONE, don't you think?
In the meantime, we were told the "porting" of our home number to my new cell phone would take 7-10 days. Only, we wouldn't know exactly when that switch would take place, except that suddenly our home phone wouldn't be working and my new cell phone would start ringing, presumably. Sounds, umm, totally shady, but whatever. So we were waiting patiently for this mysterious switch to happen (our friends and family will note that we haven't told anyone about this switch or told them my cell number has been cancelled. That's because I haven't cancelled my other cell service yet on a hunch that things with AT&T MIGHT not work out as expected, and I wanted to have at least one working phone/number in our house. Looks like that was a safe bet!).
Then today we got a call from AT&T telling us that our home phone service provider was saying that our home number was no longer active. Umm, okay, except that we can still makes calls on it. Well, they said, your service provider says it's not working so you need to call them. Umm, okay, except they are YOU! You see, we originally had phone service with Bell South, which was recently bought by, yes, that's right, AT&T. However, it appears that these two parts of the same company are incapable of talking to each other, as we have discovered by calling back and forth between them four times now, with each call telling us it's the other side's fault when I just know these people work down the hall from each other and could call across the cubicles and work this out since, to review, it's all one company, for crying out loud!
So that's what I've been doing, crying out loud. And still, no one knows what is going on and the switch hasn't happened. And the AT&T people are giving me progressively sorrier and sorrier answers, but no one knows enough to get anything done, and everyone wants to blame the other side. Of themselves. It's absurdist humor at its...worst?
2 comments:
Oh, Lil. I'm glad I stopped by your blog today. Why don't I have more time for blogs? I keep dreaming of becoming a regular commenter on something or other. ANYWAY, in the last several years I have felt completely surrounded by incompetence. We are always getting charged the wrong amount, or receiving a defective product, or needing 15 visits from the repairman for him to actually fix the problem, etc. And then I get to spend 2 hours with customer service trying to work it out. We recently tried to switch a Citibank card to an Amazon card, and it didn't work, and then when we tried to cancel the card all together (b/c we were kinda mad), we had to talk to about 15 people to do it. It was RIDICULOUS. Are my expectations too high? What is going on???
I know, right? It seems like the whole concept of customer service has turned into customer disdain, which just grates on the nerves. The sad thing is, we're so often forced to deal with them because we have so few options (ie all the telecommunications people can jerk us around because we can't go anywhere else and we can't not have a phone and they know that). It's an epidemic!
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