We moved to La Mesa from the Bay Area. My wife spoke with an SBC representative to transfer our services to our new address and the rep set up an appointment for the next week, Aug 8.
The appt day came and went but we had no phone service or contact. We had to drive to a land-line (we are in a cellular service hole) to call and ask why our phones might not be working. We waited on hold and were shuffled around, then we were told that the phone lines were working, and when confirming the service plan there was a discrepancy between our requested plan and the plan we were signed up for by the rep, and to add the features that we wanted we would be required to pay another service initialisation fee.
More time was spent on hold while waiting for a supervisor to confirm this and that there was nothing we could do about it. He told us that they wouldn’t be able to send out a technician for another week to find out what the problem was, because they couldn’t see a problem–according to their computers the line was operational so the problem “must be in the phone jacks” and that we had to find the external phone box and plug our phone into that to get service. When transferred to a service tech to make an appointment, a test of the line said that the line was not working.
We made an appointment for next week, although they told us that if they came and found a working phone line we would be charged an additional $120 for the service call, and more on top of that to fix the actual problem.
This took about an hour of holding and being transferred around so we could explain the issue over and over to each new person.
We borrowed a phone which didn’t rely on external power and looked all over for the “external phone box” with no other hint to its location or description. Standing on a ladder in our tomato garden I plugged it in and found that, indeed, our phone line did not work.
After discussion, my wife and I decided we were not happy with SBC and we wished to sign up with Cox, which we did. She had to drive out and get a signal strong enough to call SBC and cancel the tech appt and phone service.
This took another hour of waiting on hold, being repeatedly transferred, having to repeat the same request over again, and culminated in my wife’s begging, “Please, just let us go!” Instead of letting her cancel our service, they just kept transferring her to a new person each time. They seemed to find it amusing as there was no point to transferring her, and she asked “please don’t transfer me, I just want to cancel our SBC service.” Then the rep would transfer her to another rep, my wife would ask the same thing, get transferred, ask the same thing, get transferred to someone she’d already spoken to…
They sent us a “final bill” despite the fact that our service was never actually set up–our phone line never worked and the “customer service” was as rude as we have ever come across. So what are we supposed to be paying for, if not for a service that was never rendered? They would not listen when my wife called to cancel everything, and she was almost in tears in frustration at the game they seemed to be playing.
I know that “that sort of thing” probably has no bearing on this really, but it is important to us because we just couldn’t believe the impossibility of dealing with SBC–each contact meant at least an hour on the phone and many repetitions of a very simple request.
My mother-in-law told us that she has never had a problem with SBC, and that maybe it was a “La Mesa thing” (a working class neighborhood in inland San Diego) and one of the five women my wife was transferred to did say something like, “Oh well, you’re out in La Mesa…” in a snide tone, which bewildered my wife as it had no bearing on the conversation.
The billing dates are Aug 7-8. I really hope that this can be resolved, as SBC has proven to be impossible to deal with.