Yesterday, my unbroken NaBloPoMo streak was broken by the frustration that is “my internets is down!” Instead of writing about our beautiful Thanksgiving, which was as awesome as I’d have hoped, I’m going to celebrate this Black Friday by bitching about AT&T’s technical support and technology in general.
I’ll preface this by saying that my daddy is an executive director at AT&T. He has worked in the industry for about five million years, long before personal computers came about. That whole “Al Gore claims he invented the internet” thing? Well, my daddy actually built the internet, or the physical framework for it, anyway. When the first home computer came out, he brought one home, disassembled it, and put it back together…and made it faster. There is nothing my daddy cannot fix, computerly-speaking.
My daddy talked me through as much troubleshooting as possible over texting, then directed me to tech support. I called tech support and, after navigating an absurd assortment of menus, managed to get a woman who identified herself as [possibly] Eva. I wrote down “Eva” on my little note pad, in case I needed to know. I didn’t realize until a little later into the call that possibly-Eva had an accent of a type with which I am not familiar (she turned out to be in the Philippines) and she pronounced a few words oddly, so her name might not have actually been Eva at all. I’ll continue to call her “possibly-Eva” for the duration of this post.
Possibly-Eva didn’t seem to know very much about tech stuff for a tech support call center. She was clearly working from a script and any variation from that confused her. We spent an hour on the phone together before we got disconnected and she didn’t call back, despite asking for a call-back number in case we got disconnected. The high points of that hour included her insisting that “admin/password” were a very good username/password combination, because I won’t forget them, her coaching me through reconfiguring my router so poorly that my father had to spend an hour reconfiguring it again today, and her asking if I could “go upstairs and ask [my] dad for the router information” (to which I responded, “Um…he doesn’t live here, because I’m in my 30s, and this is my house.”). A service ticket was never opened for my issues.
My father had to call the support center himself to even get a service ticket. Let me remind you, he’s an executive director in this company, and they didn’t want to give him a ticket. He had to call again the next day to get a technician out to my house, at which point he was told it would be another four days before that would happen (and he did something he rarely does and which I never ask him to do, play the “do you know [x very high level manager over the technician's department] — well, he and I are peers and friends, and I’m happy to escalate this to him if I have to” card). A tech was at my house a few hours later, which is apparently a miracle. He was very nice, fixed some problems outside, fixed some problems inside, and when he left, the guys (my daddy and Officer Daddyman) turned out computers nothing would work. *headdesk*
They work on it for another half hour and can’t get it working. They go back over and work on it later and VOILA! It works.
We come home from my parents’ house and my laptop works on the newly reestablished network just fine. Daddyman turns on his computer and tries to connect and CRASH, there goes the network. Texted my daddy, rebooted the router, but nada. At my daddy’s instructions, turned off Daddyman’s computer, rebooted the router, and as you see, I am now online.
Beware: Officer Daddyman’s computer eats the internet! This is most definitely an Eff Off Friday.
