Unacceptable.

Last night I channeled 20+ years of experience in the customer service industry into one solitary moment.

Hi, I’m Crystal, and I FUCKING HATE AT&T.

Previously on MY ONGOING BEEF WITH AT&T:

• Day 1 – The Install That Never Happened
• Day 2 – Oops, We Did It Again
• Day 3 – The First Shutdown
• Day 5 – GOTO LINE 2
• Day 6 – > RUN

We were just finishing up dinner last night when we lost the TV’s stream. I reset the router, and loaded the dishwasher while it went through its reboot process. I requested a service call via AT&T’s app, which is supposed to be today, sometime after noon.

But something in me snapped. Maybe it was the fact we were only online for barely 24 hours. Maybe it was the fact that we’ve had techs out nearly every other day since Mom and Brian ordered the service. Perhaps it was the horrific idea of letting Mom call them. Regardless of the origin of the frustration, I suddenly had a focus.

I called AT&T and explained my problem. I asked the initial rep to please look at our file, because we were having the exact same problem 24 hours after our last service tech swore this was resolved. Having been on that side of the phone calls, I was nice, but firm.

“I had one of your service managers at my house a week while I was having this service installed”, I told the rep. “She tried to sell me on your phone service based on your stellar reliability that netted you a 20-year government contract. This is ridiculous.”

She transferred me to tech support, probably knowing this call had potential to go in a very bad way. Mind you, all of this is going on at about 7pm, and service appointment windows only go until 8pm. We’ve seen no less than three different AT&T tech trucks go past our house since we lost service. I explain my problem to “Bobby” the outsourced tech support. He looks up the account and confirms my service appointment for noon.

I was not having it. We’ve literally had more downtime than connectivity at this point. Every time it goes down, it’s at least another 24 hour wait. We’ve only had service since May 5. We’ve been offline for probably four of the last six days.

I had a Roadhouse moment.

This was unacceptable.

After I spent 45 minutes on the phone trying to get them to send someone out either last night or first thing this morning, I dropped the C-bomb.

“Please either transfer me to your escalation line, or your customer loyalty department. I’d like to cancel my service.”

Then I handed the phone to Mom.

By the time she hung up the phone, we’d been on the call for over an hour. Mom insisted the service be cancelled and we’d switch to cable, and the rep tried to convince her this would be bad because cable would be slower than fiber. “I don’t have any service now”, she replied. “Even slow service would be better!”

To be completely honest, I have no fucking clue what the end result of that call was. Was the service call cancelled? Was the service itself cancelled? WE DON’T FUCKING KNOW.