Once again, I spent two hours of my life that I can never get back on the phone with AT&T, getting another screw-up caused by them fixed. Unbelievable.
If you remember my story back a few months ago, I dealt with them that time about a third phone line that we put on our account. Well, last month, we received a paper bill for that particular line. We thought it was a mistake, as the amount of that bill was what we normally pay for our family plan anyway. We haven’t gotten paper bills from AT&T since we moved back from France.
We simply paid our bill online, as usual, and ignored the paper bill. Well, today, I got a “past due and you better pay your bill before we shut your phone off” notice.
Let the games begin.
So, I called, and, come to find out, the line had been set up incorrectly by AT&T. Instead of adding a line for $9.99 a month to our existing account, a whole new account and phone line were set up. Never mind the fact we got a CONFIRMATION EMAIL FROM AT&T SPELLING OUT EXACTLY HOW THE ACCOUNT WAS SET UP. Evidently, after the debacle when I was asked to provide a fake address off of Google in order to activate the line, the customer service representative set it up any old way he or she wanted to, which was completely wrong.
(To be honest, I’m not sure how this could even happen. Jeff set the whole thing up correctly online through our account, thus the confirmation email.)
Anyhow, the first person with whom I spoke today assured me that the mistake was AT&T’s, and she apologized several times before transferring me to “someone who can take care of this.” As with last time, I was transferred to someone whose first language was not English and who actually had no flipping idea how to help me.
I explained to her four separate times (and experienced four separate cycles on a lengthy hold) what I needed her to fix. The only thing that she could say was, “This is very complicated. I am going to put you on hold while I check my resources.” After the fifth time she tried to put me on hold, I told her, “I need you to put someone on the phone who can solve my problem. I don’t believe that you can solve my problem, so I need you to connect me to someone who can.
She replied, “This is very complicated. You must hold while I check my resources.”
I told her no and to connect me with someone else. She put me on hold, and I hung up.
I called back the original number and told this customer service rep that I did not want her to transfer me anywhere and that I needed her to look into the situation herself. When I explained what was going on, she apologized and told me that the other person must have been new and that she would see what she could do.
To make a long story short, the second (or is it third?) rep did have to transfer me, but she actually walked to the department who had to fix it and found someone who knew what she was doing. An hour and twenty minutes after I first called, the rep finally managed to get the third line added to to our first two.
This necessitated a phone number change and my calling back yet again to dispute the $90 that AT&T said we owed for the incorrectly connected phone line. After taking a break to put the baby down very late for his nap, I called back and spent another 30 minutes on the phone successfully disputing the bill. It mostly took this long because how grindingly slowly AT&T’s computer system seems to run.
I’ll tell you…when our contract is up, I think that we will be getting away from AT&T as fast as we possibly can. What I’m afraid of, though, is that none of the other companies are any better!
Oh, well. That’s all for today. I just had to vent. What better place than here?!
No comments:
Post a Comment