18 Feb 09 That’s the best I can do for you, sir

We had a fairly strong storm come through the Bay Area over the weekend.  On Saturday, a Santa Clara police officer showed up at our door, saying that our phone was dialing 911 and producing static.  I picked up the phone and heard nothing but static.  A few minutes later, it was back to normal and our DSL came back alive.  ”Normal” phone service around here has been bad since we bought this house two years ago (bad timing, but I’ll complain about our mortgage later).  The line has had intermittent noise problems that limit our DSL speed and make the voice portion unusable at times.

Monday morning, the phone line died completely.  Dead silence – no dial tone, no DSL.  I looked over our wiring, saw nothing except some insulation rubbed off the CAT5 cable that connects our DSL splitter to the model and taped that over, since it appeared to me that the internal wire pairs were intact.  I called AT&T/Pacific Bell to report the trouble.  Eventually, that is.

Eventually, because we don’t have any phone books in the house and when I tried to use the AT&T web site via my Treo, I found it impossible to navigate. Despite the fact that AT&T is a huge provider of mobile phone services, it doesn’t seem to have a mobile-friendly web site.  You’d think that “mobile.att.com” would be there, but it’s not.  Nor is the even more mobile-friendly “m.att.com”.  What are they thinking?  I finally gave up and dialed 411 and got the number.  After navigating the voice response system, which always seems to request the same information at least twice, I got to a live person, who said they would test the line and if they found a problem, they’d dispatch a technician no later than 8 p.m.  Not 8 p.m. the same day, but 8 p.m. the next day.  Great.

As long as I had them on the phone, I asked to be transferred to the billing department because we have been “crammed” (or “slammed,” I forget which is which) for the second time lately.   This item showed up at the bottom of our billing page:

Item
   No.  Date  Description
   Billed on Behalf of BUSINESS TO BUSINESS
   Questions?    Call: 1 888 296-8079
   3-01 12-14        BUS. TO BUS. ONLINE,INC-MONTHLY FEE                    19.95

   Total The Billing Resource                                               19.95

I called the company and they claimed that we signed up for high-speed Internet service.  Yeah, right.  Just like the crooks who started billing us for voicemail we never ordered.  They promised to refund our money and stop billing us.  But the refund will take two to three months.  Enjoy the interest on my money, crooks. 

Meanwhile, since AT&T had been willing to refund three months of the bogus charges when this happened before, I asked if they would do that for me again.  

No, absolutely impossible, the customer service rep said.  

“But I know it is possible,” I said,  ”You did it for me when this happened before.”  

“I’m sorry, sir, there’s nothing we can do.”

“But I know that isn’t true, you did it for me before.”

“There’s nothing I can do. We are required by law to allow companies to bill through us.”

Although that bit about the (idiotic) law is true, I pointed out to him that as an individual, I have little influence, but a big company like AT&T surely can lobby to change the law – and surely will if it hits them in the pocketbook.  As long as AT&T can just pass along the charges, they have no incentive to try to make change happen.

Eventually, the customer service rep offered me a $20 refund “as a courtesy.”

“That’s the best you can do?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I guess I’ll take that, then.  But make a note that we’re going to cancel our home phone service because we don’t want this to keep happening.”

“I understand sir.”  Long pause.  ”Sir, since you mentioned cancelling your service and we want to keep you as a customer, I am authorized to refund the entire amount to you.”

Huh????  This from the same guy who told me moments earlier that $20 was the best he could do.  And before that, zero was the best he could do.  I’m starting to think that if I hang on longer, they’d give me more than just a refund.  And they did.  With no further prompting, the customer service rep, who sure sounded like he was reading from a script, said, “Since you said that you are going to cancel your service and we want to keep you as a customer, I’m going to give you $5 a month off your phone and internet service for the next 12 months.  Would that be okay?”

Yes, that would be okay.  Except that we’re going to get rid of it anyway, I’m fairly sure.  But I wonder if I had held on longer, they’d eventually pay me to keep the line.  Crazy.  And no wonder I never believe a customer service rep who says, “There’s nothing more I can do, sir.”

Meanwhile, I figured out how to tether my Treo to my desktop system and go on-line at GPRS speed.  Slow, but better than nothing.  That enabled me to do something I’d been planning anyway – move my mail server and mailing lists to Bluehost.  It was a fire drill, made harder by a lack of access to the Mailman mailing list utilities, but I seem to have gotten it done.  All that’s left at home now is the back end of TwURLed News, which can tolerate brief outages and doesn’t need any incoming connections (which I figure will be a necessity if we switch to a cable modem at home).

The phone service guy didn’t make it by 8 p.m. last night.  He showed up around eight this morning and found a short in my wiring – the spot where the insulation rubbed off.  I was embarrassed that I didn’t replace that wire when I saw it, but hey, it was pouring rain.  I was doing the best I could.  He had us up and running by about 8:30.  About 25 minutes after he left, I got an automated phone call from AT&T saying that they would not be able to send a technician before 8 p.m.  Last night.  Right.

It’s good to be back on-line.  I’m doing everything I can for you from here.  Believe me.