Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Phone Troubles

About two weeks ago, shortly after the cable companies switched every last station to digital delivery requiring a box for reception of any channel over 12, a nice man and woman came to the door trying to sell us an AT&T Uverse bundle of phone, internet and cable. I'm talking real cable with over 100 channels including high def ones (for the one TV in the house that has high def capability). For us it was all about price - we desperately wanted ESPN back as football season is well underway, but we weren't going to pay more for it.

Our Comcast bill had gone from $11.75 to almost $17 a month to get nothing but local network channels and when we combined that cost with our phone/internet already set up with AT&T it was only $6 less then what they were offering.

We decided football is worth the extra $6 a month. Plus they promised us faster internet (it's not) and better quality phone service on the new fiber optic spliced wires. Yeah. About that....

It's kind of disappointing that the phone has a buzzing sound that begins anytime between 2 and 7 minutes on every call we make with this fabulous new quality system.

It's even more disappointing that the automated phone system is like a cruel joke - with no option for a human being (until 15 minutes in you scream "GETMEAHUMANBEING" into the phone. By the way, when you select "phone" for the service you need help with, the automated voice instructs you how to buy additional channels for the cable.

It's super disappointing that you have to call three times before a technician gets dispatched (three days later when they have an opening when you are actually home).

And it's downright comical that the email confirmation for the service appointment says "do not respond to this email" and provides absolutely no links for a customer service rep to credit back all the minutes you've been using to call their service department while they explain to you how valuable your business is.

So I'm without a phone at the moment and that's really aggravating.

But the Bears beat the Packers on Monday Night Football last night and we watched the whole thing on high definition ESPN. So it's a wash. :-)

1 comment:

Mark Thomson said...

I guess you can take some small comfort from the fact that you are able to use their internet service to tell the rest of us how much grief they've given you. I guess some companies still haven't figured out how much bad service costs them in lost business in the age of blogging and social networking.

Still, I feel bad for you. Bad service is very frustrating.