BigZeroLittleZero

-----------------------------------------------------------

A Phone Saga


My job for the past two weeks has been to get phone service into my home. No, we don’t live in some out-of-the-way rural area, we live in a suburb of Los Angeles. Our telephone service isn’t with a tiny mom and pop operation, it’s with AT&T. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. And we weren’t trying to get new service. No, that might be hard. We were trying to get AT&T to restore our old service.

I know what you’re thinking. They needed their service restored because they are deadbeats and didn’t pay their bill. Well, you’d be very wrong. We paid out bills. On time. For over twenty years. So, what happened? Well, we had two phone lines coming into our home. One for phone service and one for the computer. We switched out computer to the cable company, so we didn’t need two lines anymore. We politely asked AT&T to cancel the unnecessary line. They politely agreed. And then they disconnected both lines.

Well, anyone can make a mistake. We called them up. We waded through their menu options. We listened to how AT&T appreciated our call and our business. We finally got a human being. They admitted their mistake. They’d fix us right up. In three to five working days, which translates into a week. Oh and, by the way, we couldn’t get our old number back. The number we’d had for over twenty years. The number all our family and friends have memorized. This development seemed wrong. Unfair. Especially since this was their fault. We pointed this out. And our saga began.

Because of our upset, we were transferred to the “escalation team.” This team is where “managers” and “specialists” exist. Managers and specialists supposedly know more than the regular phone answerers. And, at first glance, they seem to. Well, they seemed to know a little more. After many transfers and additional phone calls, they promised that a person would appear and fix the problem exactly one week after the problem began. So we waited. Patiently.

The person actually came. He did stuff. And glory be, we had dial tone! Hallelujah! My husband called our number from his cell phone. I answered. There was joy in Mudville. The week without phone service would be forgiven. An hour later the phone stopped working.

We called AT&T again. Now, I must point out here that calling AT&T was no easy task for us. We only get intermittent cell phone service at our home, so each call required driving a mile away to the nearby park or risk losing service just at a critical point in a conversation. After wading through the menu, we demanded the escalation team. We were told that we’d cancelled the work order. No, the man came. We let him in. We wanted phone service. We had phone service, for that precious hour.

Oh, they knew what the problem was. We’d transferred our service to a different carrier. No, we didn’t. We had service with AT&T and we’d like it back. Well, first we’d have to cancel the service with the new carrier. We insisted we didn’t have a new carrier. They insisted that we did. We asked who the carrier was. They didn’t know. We’d have to call our local phone company. We called the company. Interestingly enough, we discovered that we have service with (wait for it) AT&T.

We called AT&T again. Each time you call you get someone new. Karen, Marsha, Jerry, Susan, Sandra, Guillermo, etc. And they all know nothing. The new AT&T person said the first person was mistaken. We did have service with AT&T. Great. Can we get it re-restored? Absolutely. In three to five working days. And you can’t get our old number back.

So, you see the pattern starting to evolve. Each time we called, and it was at least twice daily, the new person would be dealing with an old problem. A problem that the old person had supposedly resolved. But we kept hoping and we kept calling. My husband would come back from a bout, sweaty and incoherent. I feared for his health, and I’d take over for a while. We forgave assurances that never came true. We forgave “we’ll call you right back”s that never, ever happened. And our perseverance paid off. We finally got a new date with a new assurance that a man would come and fix things, and we’d have phone service and our old number.

I called the day before to make sure he actually scheduled to appear. After talking to five different people, none of whom could find a work order or any indication that help was on the way, I was put in touch with an escalation manager specialist who, I was told, could reconnect me from her desk. I trembled with delight. I’d been at the park for over an hour. But I felt this time everything would work out. I’d be able to call my husband at our house. We’d drink champagne. Lulu came on the line. Did I know that I’d had my service transferred to a different company? Then my cell went dead. I came home, we cried and signed up with Verizon.

Except for the names of the AT&T phone people, this is, sadly, a true story.

# posted by tj @ 6:43 AM