AT&T – The Scourge of Mankind
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Well, the saga of this corporation is to end on Friday………I will never, ever use AT&T again if I have a choice of another phone service. However, where we bought our new house only has service through ATT and Time Warner, which is, in my opinion, the choice of the lesser of two evils. I have had trouble with TW when my mother was in the rehab center for her stroke. They did not care that they left my mother two weeks without TV…….which for anyone that has been in any sort of hospital or medical center, your days are pretty much occupied by TV. I pleaded with them to get to my mother sooner – but they cared nothing of my plight.
This saga started on March 7th. I had decided to switch us to VOIP with VOIP Your Life, due to their high ratings that I found on more than one review site. I called and got the run around from several people that told me that in order to have both my existing telephone and the dry loop that the DSL switches to once the phone number port occurs with my VOIP company, that I would not be able to have both my existing phone and the dry loop connection.
I got my VOIP rep on a three way call to ATT and spoke with a supervisor in the dry loop department (Charles at position number 016) and he told me that he was able to do this for me and that he was probably one of the few people that would be able to set this up for me. So I placed the order: the dry loop was to take effect on the 14th.
On the morning of the 14th, I called ATT to ascertain status and when the order would be complete. I was told by Victor (position number VMO2084) that the order would be complete by 10AM. I got home around 1:30 PM and had no dry loop: called again and was told that it would be active by 8PM. Called again at 930PM, and was told that since all the departments were gone that could find out anything, that I would be offline until at least Monday.
You see, when I had originally talked to Charles, I had stressed very strongly that I could not be without internet due to the fact that I earn money online and they would be taking money out of my pocket and food out of my mouth. He assured me (with the VOIP rep as witness) that I would not lose service.
So, Saturday morning rolled around and I was on the phone bright and early with ATT. Talked to David (position number 100006) and he told me that he would put in an emergency order for my DSL to be connected ASAP. He also promised that he would call me by 1PM EST and let me know when that would occur.
1PM came and went and I had no service. We had company Saturday afternoon and overnight to Sunday, so I did not call ATT back on Saturday again. Sunday we did some moving around of some items people were holding for us, so we were not home until 9PM and I did not call Sunday, at all.
Again, bright and early, I was on the phone Monday. I talked to four different supervisor, all from offshore outsourcing, and go nowhere. I waited until 730AM and finally got a local supervisor and got transferred to the upper echelon at ATT, and spoke to Christa (position number KM7167). Christa had me on hold for forever and finally came back and said that my DSL had be reconnected on the 15th – once I got back home I was cycle my modem: if I could not connect, call DSL tech support to get me connected.
Of course when I got home, I had no service. I called DSL tech support and got an escalation to the Maintenance specialists. I spoke with Steve (initials SEB) and was told that I had no DSL service and that there was no order for it to be reconnected (as David had promised me Saturday).
Got transferred once again to the order department and spoke with Stephanie: she told me that even though she had called the dispatch department directly, that the very soonest she could this taken care of was Friday the 21st. You see, I had found out through David on Saturday that the reason the dry loop wasn’t connected was because there had been no one home to allow a technician admittance to my home. When I had placed the originally order with Charles, he did not tell me whatsoever that I would need to have someone come out to my home and wire anything from my phone panel. I knew nothing about this at all. So not only can the dry loop and telephone service not run together, you also have to be at your residence in order for them to configure your phone panel. So basically I had been misinformed since March 7th, and had never been told a straight story about anything.
As with any large corporation nowadays, you can never call back and speak to the same person: you have to speak with who you get and repeat your story over and over. I think I told this story about a dozen times, each time getting longer with the latest bunch of crap that ATT had told me.
By the time I got to Stephanie and got the order placed for a technician to come back out, I was mentally and physically drained. I am not joking that I have spent at least ten hours on the phone with these idiots trying to get this sorted out. By this time I had enough and needed to take a break from the ATT carousel.
This morning I called and got to the DSL billing department: straight away I transferred to a supervisor (I had started doing that early Saturday morning – yes, these were all supervisor that had filled me with misinformation) and told her the saga. I demanded restitution. She acted astounded at the whole mess and immediately gave me a “good faith” credit of $100 to my ATT account.
I am at the point now that if one more thing goes wrong and I do not have internet this Friday, that I will be taking the legal route with this: not only for the income lost by me from not having internet service, but also for the time that I spent on the telephone trying to get this sorted out . This kind of treatment is absolutely inexcusable and should not occur under any circumstances. When we first moved and got our service connected, they had given me the wrong speed internet service and we had to wait a week for them to get the correct service activated for us.
If you can at all avoid it, do not use ATT for anything: I also had cell service with them til December of 2006. I canceled my contract after being with them for over 6 years because they were attempting to charge me an exorbitant amount of money for a bill that I did not owe. Had I truly owed that bill, my service would have been disconnected two years earlier. AT7T makes is VERY difficult for you to switch to VOIP service: my rep at VOIP Your Life told me that with other carries, you can switch over to VOIP and everything switched over to dry loop the same day with no interruption in service. AT&t does this intentionally in order to hold you hostage with your phone and broadband service.
I’d like to hear any stories that you may have regarding AT&T. What’s happened to you and how did you get it settled?
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