Well they have done it again. I should say they are still doing it. My father who is 83 years old has a cell phone and has had it for years, it was in my sister’s name. When she died he took the death certificate down to the local store to have the account changed over into his name. No problem, Right? WRONG!!!!!!

He was told get this they couldn’t do it unles she okayed it- Seriously she was and still is dead, please explain to me how she can okay this. Before he went down to the local idiot store he called to see what he would have to do in order to get the account changed, He was told “just bring in the death certificate” -

He has been down there several times and each time he is told sorry no can do. Seriously. The bill comes to his house under my sister’s and his name. They say they can’t do anything without her SS number. You have got to be kidding me people.

Can you say lazy. The exucse they give is it is against the law. Really! that is the best you can do. She is I repeat dead- as in not alive not talking, buried. She is not coming back just to give you people her social security number.

They do have the ability to go in through a back door to change the account. I know this for a fact.

I have seen some idiots in my time in customer service. I have seen sloppy customer service and I have seen lazy customer service. But I must say this takes the cake.

My parents have had service with Southern Bell AKA Bell South aka AT&T since most of this supposed wet behind the ears customer services people were only a twinkle in their daddy’s eye.

I want to know what has happened to common sense, What has happened to the fact that the customer is always the customer. What has happened to doing what ever it takes to keep that customer?

What has happened to the idea that customer service people used to believe that they wanted to treat their customers like they wish to be treated.

Is AT&T so big that losing one customer won’t make a difference. Do they really want that reputation in this age of Sprint, Verison and all the other wireless services.

All it takes is a few minutes of your precious time – like you have nothing better to do- to take care of a customer  that has been with your company since 1947. Yes, that is right 1947.  In my book that is way over 50 years.

My parents are grieving for a daughter they lost to cancer and when my mother sees my sister’s name come up on caller ID it hurts her to the core. Do you care? Are you listening? Or are you just thinking it is the rantings of some old person who should not be breathing the same air you breath?

I am ashamed of this company on so many levels. First you treat my dying sister like garbage – someone who was loyal to her death, yes she never ever talked bad about you. It took my threatening her to get her to get an attorney after you. Then you treat my grieving parents like second class  citizens because you are to damn lazy to handle something so simple. One day you too may be in this position. May you always remember what you did .

Anyway, I got a new box, hooked it up to all four of my computers and went to work. Well I wanted to go to work. Every time I get on a roll my internet goes down. I have no idea where it goes or why it goes. But goes it does.  I get this lovely message that my laptop cannot connect with my server. Seriously!

In all the years I had Bell South I never lost connection. But it never ever fails, I get on a roll and the dreaded message pops up on my laptop. It has become so frustrating that if I could get my hands on who ever is in charge, I would thrash them – then make them sit at my desk and try to work.

Well you say have you called them? Are you kidding me?! I have been in the Abyss, I didn’t like it. There is nothing I have more than sitting on hold for days at a time, then getting a disinterested person who has no clue and doesn’t care that I am the customer who not  only pays their bill every month but pays it early.

Oh no, I am waiting until it goes down for a day and then I am going to call them and give the a taste of fury. They never did refund the days I was without service in June when my sister was dying.  Now have they ever refunded me any money for the time my internet was down and I couldn’t use it.

They acted like they were doing me a favor by talking to me.

So the answer is No! Why bother. The customer service is harder to get through than trying to get into Fort Knox. After you punch enough keys on your phone to start a small war and talk to an disembodied voice for an eternity- then you get a real person who sounds like they would much rather be someplace else asking everything from your shoe size to the name of your first born.

By the time you get finished rattling off your phone number, your age, your shoe size, your first born’s name, the town you live in and whatever else they come up with to ask, you are to frustrated to deal with the problem.

If Comcast had the Red Zone for Football and all the stations my husband watches during Football season I would move all my service to them, yep including my internet.  The more I deal with AT&T the more I hate them.

They have lost the personal touch- I don’t think they really ever had it. They treat their own people like they are non entities – and it rolls over to their customer service.

At one time I would have never ever considered leaving Bell South. But now if I could find another company who could provide the things I need I would leave in a heartbeat.

So beware AT&T as soon as something comes along it will be adieu to you!

I said all that to say this. When her internet went out and called the service department she was treated like she had less sense than a child- a very small child. She was first told that her modem was an old Bell South Modem and that they didn’t work on those, so she was forced to buy a brand spanking new AT&T modem at the wonderful cost of $100.00. She was told it would arrive in a few days. Really? A few days indeed! It took forever. That wasn’t bad enough, remember we are talking about someone who is elderly and not real tech savey. So this gold modem arrives and she calls again tech support to get help – she once again was treated like a small child. They didn’t want to send a tech person out to help her. The question that begs to be asked is why not? This would be a perfect Public Relations opprotunity for them. Offer that service to the elderly and disabled who depend on the internet to keep in touch with family and pay their bills and shop.

It took numerous phone calls days of literaly begging and after an eternity she finally had her service restored. This is just another reason that AT&T is losing it’s respectable reputation they just don’t care.

To add insult to injury two months prior to this incident, there was another incident that still pisses me off every time I think about it. It was at a time when my sister was dying from Leiukemia.

On Wednesday July July 28,2011, which was a Tuesday we had a bad storm and it knocked out out phone and the internet. I used my cell phone to call AT&T to report the outage. I explained to the lady in repair that I made my living using the net and that I need it fixed post haste. Her comment to me was “We will have it fixed by 6:00pm Sat.” Excuse me? We are to go five days without service but yet be charged for it. That was wrong on so many levels. When I again explained to her the sense of urgency she told me to change my number to a business number instead of residential. Excuse me again- change my number to make your life easier and that would put me higher on the scale of service. Again wrong on so many levels.

Wednesday rolled around and again I made an attempt to get my service fixed. Again I was given that same spill, they had to be reading from a scipt. Wednesday night I got a cal on my cell phone from my mother who was at the hospital with my sister. She called me on my cell because she had my dad’s phone and that number was in his phone. She told me that they were giving my sister just days to live. They were taking her home. I still had no land line to call hotels in Georgia to get rooms so we could make the trip. I had to get my daughter to look up hotels and then call me back on my cell to give me the number. Seriously?!

After many phone calls and many tears we finally left on Thursday from South Florida to make the trip to Ga. still no service from AT&T no landline and no internet. Had I not had my cell phone I would not have known my sister was near death until it was to late. After we got to Georgia I called my house on Sat and the service was working. It took five days- five days I paid for service and didn’t have.

If Bell South still had control this would have never ever happened. They would have gone out of their way to make me their customer happy as they would have done for my elderly mother.

They all talk from the same script and they all treat their customer’s who pay their salary like they are doing the customer a favor by just talking to them much less fix the problem. Their attitude is “don’t bother me. I don’t have time for you. You are not important to us.”

Think again AT&T we as customers are your bread and butter. Yes, the trend is toward wireless and cells, but remember- we still have those too.

So the next time you treat a customer on the other end of the phone like they are not worth your time, just think about this it could be your elderly mother on the other end of that phone frustrated because she can’t pay her bills, it could be your sister at death’s door waiting for you to come tell her bye. It could be your wife who is at home with a new baby who is sick and she can’t get to the doctor. It could be your brother who is disabled and needs the phone or net to communicate. Put yourself in your customer’s place because in the end, you are a customer of AT&T too!

When she went to college it was to get a degree in Mass Communication so she could work for a company she loved. She spent her entire life eating, breathing and living  Bell South. She survived the transition from Southern Bell to Bell South the split from AT&T to AT&T. She kept her stocks when AT&T was forced to split off from Bell South. She refused to turn them in.

She was always on call and she refused to leave work until the job was  completed. She gave everything she had to this company for 30 years.

Fifteen months ago my sister Sheila R. Cross was diagnosed with Leukemia.  She was put in the hospital and started an extreme regime of Chemo and blood transfusions. She continued to keep and upbeat attitude thinking she would go back to the job she loved. But AT& T was not loyal to her.

She was forced to retire with the promise that the lawyers AT&T had hired would help her get her disablity and help her with her retirement. This was a lie. Not only did they not help her they tried to keep it all from her.  They held up her retirement checks and then told her that she had been over paid. She was afraid to deposit any checks because she felt like they would come after her.

She was fighting for her life and AT&T was trying to take what little she had left. She didn’t have the strength to fight them She had to hire an attorney to get what was rightfully hers. In the meantime she was learning that she was terminal. There was no hope she was not a candidate for a transplant.

To add insult to injury when she died on July 2,2011, AT&T didn’t want to pay our her life insurance. The attorney had to fight for that. They didn’t want to give the children Sheila’s retirement money, the attorney had to fight for that. This was money that Sheila had put into her retirement.

This is wrong on so many levels. Sheila gave over 30 years of her life to a company who didn’t care, who treated her like a number and who when she was down threw her to the wind.

Maybe this explains why their customer service is so bad. They are to big to care. They hire people off the street who have no clue as to what real life is all about. Their HR department is as compassionate as wet paint. They customer service department is as professional as dry cement.

This company needs an enema from the top down. They all need to be retrained in being professional, compassionate, kind and the right kind of manners. They need to learn a sense of urgency in dealing with their customers and their employees who are also customers and who pay their salaries.

My sister believed in this company right up until the day she died. She loved this company, but it was a one way relationship. They used her, abused her and then tossed her out like yesterday’s newspaper. They didn’t care about Sheila the person all they cared about was Sheila the number.

Now you know why you can’t get anything out of AT&T we are all just a number.

Okay I thought no problem. The power went out during the night and I need to reboot the modem. I stumbled into the office that holds the modem and looked. The power light was red, and there was only one green light lit up on the modem.

Now remember, I have not yet had the breakfast of champions, that being my morning coffee. My own children don’t even speak to me until I have had at least one cup of coffee. So imagine what happened when I had to place that dreaded called to the nether world called AT&T.

Remember it is 7:30 in the morning. The morning went something like this.

Phone call to internet service, call answered by computer,

“please give tell me your problem so I can direct you to the right place.” then she gives me a list of possible problems none of which is my problem.

The computers kept saying, I don’t understand you, please speak clearly. Really, how much more clear could I speak.

So I did the next best thing. I kept hitting the zero button. Some diembodied voice was not going to get the best of me. Finally it said, “I will give you someone who can help you.”

Finally, a human. Now we are getting someplace. But not so fast. The name behind the human voice was named Daniel.

He worked in Tec Support and spoke like he was speaking from a script and like he was talking to a two year old. I am old enough to be his grandmother and he wants to talk to me like I am an idiot. That was his first mistake.

I  still have not yet had coffee, but I am maintaining my cool. So far. I politely explained to him what had happened and what I needed and how fast I needed it.

He asked my number, my shoe size, the name of my first born, my SS number, my husband’s SS number and other asinine questions before he decided that I was indeed not jack th Ripper or Ted Bundy or a stalker.  Now this is where it goes from just asinine to plain stupid. And we all know that you can’t cure stupid.

He told me, and had I been awake and functional, remember to coffee., I would have stopped him in his tracks, that I didn’t have the network program. Really! I have had it for years, we have enough computers in this house to start a war in a small Texas town. Anyway on to the absurdity of this entire morning.

Young Daniel said that he didn’t have the authority to order me a new modem and have it over nighted, it would be here in two or three days. He would give me a number to the sales, department. I felt my skull split and fire shoot out of my eyes. I had already been on the phone with him for over 30 minutes as it was now 7:50. I said ”So are you telling me that you are going to make me make yet another phone call because you can’t help me.?”

Daniel felt my wrath and if wasn’t pretty.

He started back pedaling and said, well if you can hold on for ten minutes I can connect. The sales department opens at 8:00. The fire that had been shooting out of my eyes turned to daggers. If Daniel had been in front of me I would have cheerfully choked him. So I went on perma hold, you know that black hole that people fall into when no one wants to deal with them. That same black hole they drop you in when they hope you will hang up an go away. Well Daniel didn’t know me. I held on til 8:00. He came back on and said that he was connected me with a girl named LaShonda and she could help me expedite the modem. He immediately hung up. All he wanted was to get me off his phone. (I don’t suffer fools lightly)

Well for the second time I explained to LaShonda the who, what, where, when, why and how of my dilemma. She said, “I see a pending order, but I can’t expedite it.”

My reply was “Are you kidding me? I have been on this phone for almost an hour and you are telling me it can’t be done.”

Her answer was, ”I can give you a number to call….”

By now I am ready to punch the wall. “I very calmly, to calmly said, “So now I have to make yet a third phone call to get this fixed?”

She said, “I will connect you but here is the number just in case.”

I wrote it down – she connected me and guess what the number was…. The very first number I called when I got Daniel.
By now I am beyond furious. It is now 8:30,. I have to be at the Vet by 9:00 and I still don’t have an answer.

After I listen to the disembodied voice asking what my problem is, I beat to death the zero button again and finally get another child on the phone this time a female.

She wants to know how she can help me. I tell her I want a supervisor now, she wants me to tell her the problem so she can pass it along to her supervisor – Really- You have a woman who is looking to punch out the nearest person or thing and you want to carry on a conversation? She puts me on hold -

Then she comes back and said, her supervisor was  on the phone. I have to explain things to him. This makes the fifth time I have had to explain the problem. He asks me all the $64,000.00 questions and when he is satisfied that I am indeed wh0 I say I am he looks up the order. This is where it gets really interesting. There is no order. Nada, Zilch, None.

By now my patience meter has gone off the charts. I have none and am ready to eat nails and spit out tacks.

Tim, the supervisor said that Daniel could have already taken care of the problem and yes it could be overnighted and he would do it. In the mean time, I could to go McDonalds or Starbucks to work. Seriously! Then he added insult to injury and said, “You know you can change your residential to a business and the service basically would be a priority .”

Are you kidding me. Just because it is a residential number we don’t count as much? I hate to break it to all of these idiots we are the reason they get a pay check. Tim obviously has no idea what all is involved in being an indie Author. He was flippant and condensending because I am only a resident and not a business.

This is typical of AT&T. Several weeks ago my mom called because of a modem problem and she was treated like she was an idiot.

It took her forever to get her internet up and running again. She is 81 years old.

The way they treat their employees who have been with them forever is even worse. There will be a blog for that too.

The lesson to take away from this blog is this, if you need a person at AT&T to help you solve a problem, understand you will need to take Prozac, drink three pots of coffee, and several adult beverages just to get you through the maze of disemodied voices, then you will need nerves of steel and the patience of Job to deal with the infinite Stupdity that is a requirement before the employee is hired at AT&T.

Then there is no guarentee that your problem will be handled in a timely manner of with any type of intelligence. I have determined there is no intelligent life form in the halls of AT&T.

When Southern Bell was just Southern Bell the service was wonderful, one could call and get a real person with waiting until the phone had grown to their ear. The customer service department was so good that when one got off the phone it was a pleasure to have talked to them.

Once AT&T crawled in bed with Southern Bell, the customer service department became a nightmare from hell. Every time one calls it is like Ground hog day all over again. They are rude, crude and sociably unacceptable. They act like they are being bothered because you the customer who is paying their salary called. They act like your business is no big deal and if you lose phone service due to a storm so what. They could care less.

They have no sense of urgency nor do they appear to care about the reputation of their company.

This blog has been set up so that others who are tired of the way they are treated by AT&T have an outlet to vent their anger and frustration about the service.

Feel free to vent!