Communications woes
So, hey, I must have pushed my good moving luck, because our phones suddenly quit working. Internet is fine. The phone, she is dead.
SBC—oops, I mean AT&T—has a website that is a total nightmare. A couple weeks back, I couldn’t sign up for service via the said website because no matter what I told it, it couldn’t grok what apartment I was going to live in, even though it clearly had the apartment in its system. But the woman I eventually called was nice enough, and the phone was working when I got here, so I shrugged and put it down to business being business.
Getting the DSL connected went through some Flash monstrosity off AT&T’s website. Nearly drove me to distraction several separate times, but I got through it, and now the DSL Just Works, as it ought to.
Today David got an email from his mom, who tried to call today (as is her usual Sunday practice) and couldn’t get through. Is the Internet working? I ask. Yes, it is.
Try to get help for a dead phone line via that horrendous pile of steaming effluent that AT&T calls a website. Just try. For added spice, try when you’re a new customer. If you go through the Repair steps, you land on an extremely inhospitable screen saying “Sorry, no dice, we can’t help you because your service just started up. Try calling us.”
If I could call you monkeys, I wouldn’t have to call you monkeys. Construe the syntax in the previous sentence however you choose.
So I try another route into the customer-service system. AT&T asks me for this gizmo called a Customer Care Number that’s on top of my bill.
Right. The bill I haven’t actually gotten yet because I haven’t had service long enough. That bill.
Sigh. After considerable additional experimentation, I finally manage to coerce the site into letting me send an email to customer service. Shortly thereafter, a roboanswer lands in my emailbox. They’ll get back to me in 24 hours, they say.
Sure. I’ll believe that when I see it.
The one mild form of pleasant schadenfreude I take from this annoying experience is that libraries and library associations are not the only organizations in the world with websites that just plain suck.