1 week in the AT&T Black Hole
What a freaking week. The remnants of Fay shorted out my phone line last week, apparently, so that I had no dial tone for the whole week (but still had DSL, oddly enough). Then, on Friday, my DSL finally gave up the ghost and I was w/o phone or Internet. I can live w/o phone, as I have a cell phone (even though I barely get reception at my house) but my Internet connection is my livelihood, since I work from home, so this was a bad thing.
After discovering the Internet outage, I headed up the street to Starbucks (that’s kind of redundant, eh?) figuring they have AT&T Wi-Fi for free. Of course, that was too good to be true. For some reason, my AT&T credentials didn’t work there. So, I called the Wi-Fi support number, which promptly passed me over to the residential support, which promptly passed me back to wi-fi support, which promptly passed me to residential support, which promptly passed me… You get the picture. Voice mail hell. What a glorious, technical world we live in. AT&T’s voice mail system has to be the dumbest one I’ve heard in a while. The biggest problem, of course, is that it is all voice operated, i.e. they don’t allow you to input numbers to make choices. Why is that a big deal? Because when your in a store w/ background music playing and other people talking, the stupid system can’t understand a word you say, and yet you have no way of getting through to someone to help. Aaaargh.
Needless to say, I’m not happy w/ AT&T right now. Although they did fix the phone when they said they would, so that is good. Mostly, I’m just not happy w/ their tech. support for Wi-Fi. Whatever happened to push 0 for Operator? Mind you, I usually don’t mind going through voice prompts to get what I need as it can be simpler, especially in a well-designed system, but AT&T’s is anything but that.
I would switch at this point, but I am moving soon anyway, so it is not worth the hassle.
