Vile phone company...your service is pants

The BBQ Pit
1

On Wednesday, my phone stopped working. I used my mobile and called the oligarch’s service line. After much listening to reams of questions and pressing of 1’s, I finally got through to a human. She informed me that they’d send a repair guy. On SATURDAY. My bitching and moaning fell on deaf ears. Why, I demanded to know, would it take THREE DAYS to send a repair guy? Not only would I be without a home phone, we’d also be deprived of our DSL line, so no computer either.

“Tough titty” was the essence of their response.

Since deregulation of the monopoly phone company, we’re supposed to have CHOICES, but when it comes to servicing the lines, there’s no choice whatsovever. Even if I switch providers, it’s still the same dumb ex-monopoly doing repairs. Grrr.

Finally, a guy arrived Saturday morning to tell me that he’d found “a loose wire in the field”, whatever that means. Service was restored.

But why did it have to take THREE FUCKING DAYS to find a loose wire? I bet if the President of the asshole phone company had a loose wire, they’d find it and fix it in a heartbeat. Do I get to deduct 10% from my phone bill for the three days I was completely without service? Not.

It sucks.

  • PW
2

Ha! I remember when deregulation of cable was going to give us all kinds of choices and make it cheaper for the consumer. Tell it to Comcast, the one service in my area. Period.

3

The repair department should be issuing you credit for time out of service. If it doesn’t, call or write customer service and tell them you expect credit for time out of service. Repeat as needed.

4

You’re complaining about three days?

Try three weeks. In some cases, it was even three months.

5

Palewriter, out of curiosity where are you?

6

Otto’s right. If you have no service for three days, you shouldn’t be charged for those three days. I would make them issue you a credit, rather than just short paying them. The collections department is probably not directly connected to the service department, and they might shut you off again for nonpayment.

7

Pants?

8

While I have several complaints about my cable company which I won’t go into here, I WILL say that they’re always very good about offering credits for interrupted service. When I call to report that the cable’s down, I am told to call Billing when it’s repaired. Each repair person also reminds me to call Billing to get my credit for the time that I didn’t have service. I’ve never had a problem receiving credit, either, they look up and see that I’ve reported a problem and they always, ALWAYS give me credit.

9

Well it’s not my phone company, but my satelite dish company…

I had originally called in because I was getting a “mosaic” effect. After making me undo and redo every cable and cord that has the pleasure of mulitplying like bunny rabbits in back of my wall unit, we discovered that it was the satelite dish itself that was the problem. The tech told me to kind of tap it, like I’m burping a baby. So I did this and ran back and forth to see what the reception level was at. I finally got the reception to a satisfactory level, but asked them to send a guy to get it back to the way it should be. Tech Support told me they were putting in the request and someone would call me to arrange for an apointment. Fine.

About 4 days later, on a Tuesday night, I completely lost reception. So I phoned again and asked when I could get my repair guy out. Apparently no one had put in a request for anything but the guy could do it now. FINE!
~ He says: Ok, how about on Friday?
~ I said: Ok, what time?
~ He says: Oh we don’t give times, it could be between 8am and 8pm.
~ I said: I have a job to do on Friday that will take about 4 hours. If you give me an idea, I can push back the apointment or get it over with early in the morning.
~ His response: No, we can’t give times. The work is contracted out. Sometimes the guy calls you the night before, but that’s depending on the guy. Sometimes he won’t.
~ I said: Ok, then I guess I need the guy on Saturday.

 The guy ended up getting here at 5pm!  It wasn't that my dish had blown in the wind, as the original techie said.  It was the little thingy that the dish points into that was broken.  No burping would have fixed that.  And the TIME I wasted waiting!  That's just crazy in my opinion.  He could have AT LEAST called me in the morning and told me that he wouldn't be here before at least 3pm, so I could benefit from the day.  But in this day and age, I know that's too much to ask.

 On top of it, when I called for a 4 day credit, they told me that they would give me a credit for 3 days, because I had SOME service on the Tuesday and SOME service on the Saturday.  But they could only credit me after my next bill.  I was too pissed off to fight with them.

 Epilogue to the story:  I once again have MOSAIC going on.  And I just can't be bothered to burp my dish or to call them.  I'll read these boards instead!  LOL
10

I too would like to echo the comments of a previous poster and muse:

PANTS? :confused:

11

Oh, sweet lord, do I ever hate the phone company. BellSouth, to be specific.

Many times I have spent over an hour on the phone with their tech support people – mostly on hold – as they resolve some new problem or another that’s cropped up with our business lines. So when a rival company (Birch, to be specific) came by the office to sell us their money-saving alternative service, I jumped.

We were under contract with BellSouth to keep a certain minimum amount of business with them. I know this from the Birch company representatives – when I called BellSouth to find out the details of our contract, they denied that we had any contract with them at all. Why did they deny this? Because their computer system apparently keeps no records whatsoever, and the customer support staff either can’t or won’t go looking for the paper records.

Anyway, we left our DSL line with BellSouth to maintain the minimum necessary account with them; we switched our (nonexistent) long-distance on the account over to Birch, however, so that we wouldn’t be charged a lovely $15.00 fee each month for not spending at least $15.00 on long-distance on the line.

A couple of weeks later, our Internet went out. I called BellSouth tech support, and they told me there was an area outage, which would be resolved by the morning. They didn’t tell me this right away, mind you – they told me about the area outage after they spent twenty minutes walking me through some diagnostic routines that I had already tried before calling and that I’d told them about as soon as I started talking to them.

Next day, DSL was still down, and they told us the outage was ongoing. Same thing the next day – which brings us up to Monday.

Monday, the tech support staff say that there’s no area outage, there hasn’t been an outage in our area, and there’s no record of our previous calls. They’ll be glad to send out a technician on Wednesday, however. Despite my pleadings, they won’t send anyone out any earlier than that.

(Mind you, I work for a humane society, and our Web site features daily-updated pictures and descriptions of all our animals; this hasn’t been updated in a week at this point).

Wednesday, the technician gets out to the shelter, and tells me after poking around for a bit that he can’t do anything with the line because it’s no longer with BellSouth.

Uh, yeah it is, I say. But he denies it, so back on the phone I go, calling BellSouth and Birch. Turns out BellSouth claims they can’t have DSL service on a line unless they have long-distance on the line – something nobody at either company has ever heard of before.

Incidentally, every time I call them they ask me for my name and my address and my contact telephone number. Does their system really not keep this information? Are they deliberately trying to piss me off by making me repeat the most basic information on each call?

BellSouth says they’ll be glad to establish a new DSL account for us, since we gave up our old one. “NO WE DIDN’T!” I want to yell, but I’m too nice to yell, so I agree to have them do that. They’ll have it done by Friday, they assure me. No earlier.

Monday comes. No DSL. They don’t show record of any service call, but they’ll send someone out by Wednesday. I ask for a supervisor and am put on hold for fifteen minutes. When the supervisor gets on the line, he keeps me on speakerphone for the whole time, making it almost impossible for me to make out a single word that he says, even though I keep asking him to speak louder. He’s the most spectacularly unhelpful employee I’ve ever encountered there.

Thursday morning, and no DSL. But wait! I can get a signal from the modem at least! I suggest to tech support that maybe some cretin changed our login without telling us, and that’s exactly what they did. That is, they reconnected our service, but never bothered to let us know either that the job was finally done, or that we had a new login and a new password.

Never mind that. It’s finally working.

Friday I get a call from BellSouth: they noticed that we’d switched our lines away from BellSouth, and they really wanted us to return!

Oh, but I gave it to that chipper saleslady, recounting the saga in the fury known only to the bureaucratically defeated. By the end of it she was nearly sobbing, “Stop! Don’t tell me any more! I love animals, and I give money to our local humane society! I’m so sorry!”

Their service isn’t pants. Their service is a fucking poison ivy buttplug.

Daniel