My Weekend With AT&T

In the wee hours of last Friday I was working on my computer, when all of a sudden I was taken off line and could not get back on. When morning came my husband looked at it and said that they either shut us off, or we had an equipment problem. I hadn't gotten any shut of notices or calls so we just waited through the day Friday to see if the outage would correct itself. When the service did not come back on by Friday evening, I figured maybe it was due to the payment being a little late, so Saturday morning we went to an agent and made a payment. We waited another five hours and I decided to call to see what the holdup was. I discovered that not only the internet was still out, but now our phone was completely dead. I used a cell phone and called AT&T only to talk to a computer who jumbled up my phone number when I entered it. I was informed by the computer that most of their offices were closed until Monday and that they could not help me till I made a payment. I tried to call again later and now the computer told me that my account had not been suspended. Stupid computer right? We resigned ourselves to waiting until Monday morning to talk to a real person.

I called the collections department who told me that our account was closed due to a late payment. They said I needed to be transferred to the business department. They told me I needed to open up a new account. They transferred me to that department who said that our account was never turned off and that I would have to be tranferred to the repair department. The repair department told me that we cancelled our account because we had another provider. When I told them we did not cancel and all we wanted was service to be restored they agreed to send out a repair person on Tuesday.

Tuesday morning they called my house and said that they did some trouble shooting and that we should call the business office. The business office told us our account was not suspended and they transferred me back to repair. Repair told us to call their internet department and they transferred me there, where I was then transferred to the phone department. Each of these transfers was accompanied by a five to ten minute wait. The phone department transferred me back to repair. I finally snapped and told them there had better be a repairman at the house that day and they can sit on the phone and talk to all their departments. During that call my phone and internet service were back on and repair told me That the problem was a missing set of numbers in their programming and they're very sorry.

The first thing I did was to check my e-mail and found a piece from my father saying that Saturday night he had to rush my mom to the ER because of her heart again and that he was not able to reach me. I was livid. My mother could have died and I wouldn't have known till Tuesday? AT&T cannot be trusted and they certainly cannot resolve problems. I'm a freelance writer and work on-line so I also lost four days of work. My husbands boss attempted to contact him to work on Saturday but he lost that day because they couldn't get in touch with him. Thank you AT&T!