the phone company redux

DATELINE Los Angeles 25 January 2007

I expect to hear from AT and T (the "new" AT and T) again. I shouldn't, by rights they should be done with me, but I do expect yet another call. Let me tell you why...

Now, a lot of people thought we had heard the last from AT and T, Megaconglomerate many years ago, when they were broken apart in anti-trust hearings in the early 1980s. Many were upset when that happened, but not because they loved the phone company, so much. I guess it's better to get screwed by a known quantity than to have to break in a new one. Maybe these people knew that our government would figure a way to foul this operation up, or maybe they all knew that in another 25 years the various bits and pieces of the phone company would find their way back to Frankenstein's laboratory and reconstitute as a bigger and less responsive monstrosity than ever. I doubt it, but who knows? Last year that pretty much happened. And, Pacific Bell, one of the Baby Bells (or RBOCs for independently owned and operated Regional Bell Operation Companies) has now wended it's way from Pacific Bell branding through SBC then SBC-Yahoo to AT and T now. So, my DSL service from Pacific Bell is now provided by AT and T, "a completely different company" from the AT and T it was. Right.

I called the phone company a couple weeks ago - 10 January 2007. I had returned from work on the 9th and found that my internet connectivity was as good as dead. I could "log on" after a lengthy wait, watching my router WAN screen showed that the network had connected. But then, I didn't really have an empirically provable connection. I had an assigned IP, but could not surf to web pages dependably, or exchange email, download files, play my online game. I managed to load a couple pages, but then I had no interactivity from there, and reloading either took the page away or had no effect.

So, I ran through the troubleshooting that I knew the ISP/phone company would suggest... all the cables were connected, all the settings were right, the network connections were good and functioning fine, which I verified by transferring some files around, which went very quickly. I even swapped the cable connecting the DSL modem to the wireless router with a cable from the router to a computer. I powered everything down and let it "rest" a while, then powered up and did the steps again. All good. Except the network upstream from me.

Satisfied that the problem was upstream, I went to bed after doing other things for a couple hours. There had been some pretty stiff winds in the region for the last few days, just before it went out. I thought I'd just give them a day to fix it on their own. It seemed better than jumping at the less-than attractive prospect of sitting in a CS queue for however long it might be if it could be avoided.

So, the next night I got home, redid the same troubleshooting routine, and when I again found the same results I called the tech support number. Well, TBH I dialed 411 and asked for the AT and T/SBC-Yahoo/Pacific Bell dot net support number, which got a laugh and the info I needed.

I called around 8 PM my time, and suspect I was not speaking with anyone in the US, which is pretty standard. I don't really know, though, since the response I got to the question "Where...?" was met with the rather dissembling "I am at the facility, sir, and we will forward your information to an office near you in California..." which made me laugh, inside. Blow back from people getting tired of talking to Bombay for CS, making people in outsourced jobs a bit wary of being honest and forthcoming, maybe?

To the companies credit, I did not have to wait on the phone all that long. I don't remember my wait time, but it wasn't as bad as it could've been, and seems to me it was less than it has been in the past.

So, when Tina answered we did the trouble shooting steps that I had already done, but with her listening (to keep me honest?) and then, after 20 minutes or so, she finally pinged my modem, or did whatever it is that she needed to do to test my modem's signal. No surprise to me, she found that the signal was very weak.

"Your modem has a very weak signal." she told me, sounding a bit surprised, and possibly even disappointed. "That is not good." So, we had our little chat about where she was located, which I dropped quickly because I don't really care, and she told me that I would receive a call back "after about maybe 5 hours" which put the call at about 1 AM my time. Not a terribly attractive prospect, since I get up at 5:30 AM during the week so I can get to my desk in Santa Monica by 7 AM. I asked that she please have the Maintenance Department call me back in the morning, and since I was requesting a call back for after I would actually be at work, I asked that they call me on my cell phone.

I guess this was too much information to make the trip from "the facility" to "an office near me in California." This is where it actually got a bit odd. Lori (my better half) answers the phone the next morning, and is told by the person on the line that my order for Pro speed DSL cannot be executed because of my distance from the sub-router (or whatever the thing is called, this was third hand info and a couple weeks+ ago) so I am being down-graded to Express service and my monthly charges will be lowered.

Obviously, that sounds good to me, presuming they actually get the line functioning again, and they haven't actually reduced my connection speed from whatever it was before it went dead. Still, the idea that I had ordered an upgrade to my service was a bit mysterious, and held my interest.

For the record: The only change I have actually contemplated in my internet service in the past few years, well, actually, in this century, has been a cost cutting plan I had a couple years ago, which would have involved dumping the phone company altogether as my isp.

For a few dollars more I could've switched my isp to my cellular provider and dropped a $70 to $80 monthly expense. Then add a $200ish dollar one time expense for a new toy to create a cellular wireless network in the home and in a year I have saved $750 or so over the next year... and eliminated what was not yet the reincarnation of the mindless behemoth that AT and T is surely headed towards becoming from my list of corporate creditors.

Unfortunately, it was not to be, since as I began contemplating this move and researching the process, the better half bought some new phones, that were "the coolest!" and kind of were nice, actually. Too bad I didn't have my idea a week earlier, though.

But, I digress...

So, I called the phone company back, and tried to get some info. I gave my incident number and was told that the ticket was closed. To get rid of me I suppose, this CS rep tells me that if I was told I would get a call back then I would certainly get one back within 24 hours.

So, I called back a few more times, starting that night about the 24 hour mark. They tell me it can take up to 48 hours for a call back. Then 24 hours later, calling again, I am told it can take up to 72 hours. I don't recall now if I called again, but it clearly can take up to however much time the phone company feels like spending, to get a call back, and that is sure to feel familiar to anyone who remembers the old AT and T.

By the time I gave up on calling them again, the DSL was up and running, and seemed to be a bit faster than I remembered it being previously. I came to the conclusion that there had either been a wind induced outage in my neighborhood, or perhaps the phone company had, purely by coincidence, chosen that time frame to do some work in my neighborhood on the connection infrastructure, ninja style. Whatever, it didn't matter that much, right? So I let it go, an act of personal growth for an old flogger of dead horses like me.

A few days ago, Lori says, "You have a phone message. That's all I am going to say, but go listen." A computer, it turns out, had called me to tell me that my DSL Pro service is installed, working and have a nice day or something similar. That's the DSL Pro service I cannot get due to my distance from the router, right? Money's tight, so this is important to me. DSL Pro is billed at twice as much as what I have been told I am now going to be paying. A quick call to the phone company gets me Jennifer. In talking to her I find out some interesting things.

• Jennifer assures me that I am not being charged for DSL Pro. She also tells me that I am getting the DSL Pro speed service without the price.


• the phone company was indeed working on the infrastructure in the 'hood, in the time frame I had guessed they were doing that.


• The reason I was being told I had ordered the DSL Pro had to do with me actually calling in about my DSL being out, which created a work order.

the phone company is apparently not blessed with the communication abilities needed to distinguish an internally generated order and a customer generated order. It might be worth their while to distinguish these from each other, as it could reduce customer anxiety. Which might promote customer stability. Which will be likely to increase income for the company, and thereby the sustainability of the company.

Again, I digress...

"Thanks for your time, Jennifer." I say as I finish up with the CS Rep who seems to have actually provided Customer Service.

The next night, I got home and Lori seemed to be laughing inside. "Go listen to the messages" I asked who called. "Just listen. To both messages" So, I do that. Another AT and T bot called, this time to tell me that my trouble ticket would expire soon, if I did not call asap! The other was from Ruth, who essentially repeated the info that the bot had left.

So I called back, and spoke with Amanda eventually. First I spoke with two other people, neither of whom could I bring myself to ask their location. The first was a woman who sounded too much like she was in Bombay or the surrounding region, and the second was a man who apparently was only barely able to communicate in the first place. Amanda and I spoke for a few minutes, and when I did ask her "Where?" she told me that she lived in my aunt Pat's neighborhood in northern California, or area, anyway. I told her to be careful on the freeways, since Pat is a race car driver. She laughed and told me almost everyone in the area thought they were race car drivers, so she is always careful when out driving. Apparently all the drivers in that area are also crazy. Then she assured me that the phone company would stop harassing me, and we parted cordially. She did not actually use the word harass or any of it's derivations. She just said the ticket was now closed and I would actually have to call again before the phone company would start calling me again.

I have no confidence that this is true, despite the fact that I believe that Amanda was bing totally honest with me, i.e. she believed every word that she said to me. Jessica had sounded equally confident in her assertion that my CS experience had ended. I believed that she, too, was being completely and totally honest with me. It isn't the individual employess of the phone company who are not worthy of my trust. It is any entity of the size that the phone company is again becoming. Large beasts move slowly, think slowly, react slowly, and are prone to making more mistakes.

If you ever played the telephone game in class with 10 or 20 people you knew, imagine it on a global scale, with tens of thousands with whom you are not acquainted, speaking multiple langages and dialects of those languages.

So, I expect that I will hear from the phone company again. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, but soon, and for the rest of their life. They have my number, and they are just getting too big to remember that they have finished with me. Plus, I give good phone.