AT&T IS THE WORST!

When we were arranging to move all of our services over to the new address, we realized it had come time to break free of AT&T's DSL service.  Good thing, too, as the moron on the first sales call informed us that "traditional DSL" (the oxymoronicness of that phrase boggles my mind) was not available at that address.  Of course, the smarter gentleman we spoke with a week later begged to differ, but by that point we'd already decided to go with Cable Internet.  We could've also chosen to move our phone service to the cable provider, but as children of earthquake country, we've bought into the need to have a landline that is independent of the power grid.

We arranged to have the phone service moved on Thursday, and set up a service call for 4-8pm to have someone check the jacks in the house to see which ones work and then to install at least one new jack.  My brother agreed to go out to the house to wait for the service tech and supervise the visit, as he has agreed to do so much for us, because the 4-8 window encompassed one feeding and possibly butted up against another one.

So he dutifully waited, getting there early just in case.  We ordered him a pizza and had it sent to him where he was sitting on the front steps reading a book and listening to satellite radio.  At 8:15 I got a call from him saying the tech had never shown up.  I tried to call to investigate.  I say "tried" because I only had my cell phone, which is on AT&T's network and as such gets less than intermittent service here.  The only folks who would answer the phone with an actual live person were the wireless division, and they tried mightily to help, but could only get me as far as the same voice mail hell I found, which told me I had two service calls scheduled, which should both be completed by now, and that the office was closed and I should call back tomorrow at 8am.  And I had the call drop three times just to get that far!

I looked up my account online and sure enough there was a note on the service call details that read "delayed - please call" and listed the phone number for the customer we-don't-care department that closes at 5.  I called my AT&T voice mail at this point and, wouldn't you know it, there's a message from  Nicole Walker at AT&T, left at 8:21, saying that she was trying to contact me about my service call (though she fails to mention why) and that she'll try me on my other number.  But she didn't try my cell phone, which is not only listed in my AT&T file as my alternate contact number, but also was on my voice mail outgoing message in case people tried to call during the move!

So now I'm wondering just how much an AT&T technician makes per hour so that I can charge them at that rate for the 5 hours my brother sat there and the two hours I've spent tonight trying to deal with it (not to mention the time I'll have to spend tomorrow dealing with it).  The Cable company comes at 2 tomorrow to set up the tv and internet, and if they're punctual, they might just get a bonus phone order.  And unless AT&T is really, really, REALLY apologetic, my iPhone will be jumping to Verizon as soon as it possibly can.