Move is done. By that I mean one wife, one kid, 2 cats, 1 dog, and 3 cars are now safely in new home in Florida.

Last month I spent nearly 4 hours over a handful of phone calls to setup phone, cable, internet with AT&T. The guy shows up yesterday at 9am and announces he is here to do internet. What about phone and cable? I dunno. His partner looks it up and tells up the cable boxes shipped last month. Then he revises that to say the cable order was flat out cancelled. I lose my shit. If my wife hadn’t intervened I would have told them to get their shit and leave. They finally left 6, yes 6, hours later and everything was working correctly.

So basically nothing got done on day 1.

Leave to get some food, shop for 2 new mattresses, and pick up a roku for the TV. Find a ridiculously expensive mattress complete with a “box spring” that moves your head and feet as you desire. I initially was uninterested until I tried it and then it literally sold itself. Expensively. The guy offers a no interest payment plan that included basically the store eating the first three payments. Save some $$$ so I’m willing to do it. He puts it all in computer and a few minutes later has to call the bank and they want to speak with me. Ok. Standard questions, asks for my phone number. I left my phone at home and tell her that so I ask if she will takes my wife’s number or mine with the caveat you can’t reach me on it right this second. I get bumped up to a manager. Basically she says we need to confirm who you are. Ok. Says she will send me an email that I can fill out and I quote, “in 3-5 days we will review it and make our decision”. I ask if I had my phone would the process be different because I’m only like 10 minutes from the house and can go get it. Her actual answer, “maybe”. I told her I have bought cars easier than this, slid the phone across to the mattress guy and said that was the dumbest fucking financial conversation I have ever had and I would just buy the mattresses outright.

Then I make the mistake of going into Sams Club for a Roku Stick. Nobody can answer the basic question of the difference between the Roku Ultra fir 98 bucks (which I already own 2 of at home) and the Roku Stick which just plugs into an HDMI port and only costs 38 bucks. Never got an answer and they are all locked up so I go to register as I’m told and request the Roku Stick and the lady very authoritatively announces that they are all Roku Sticks. I’ve fucking had enough of incompetence for one day and loudly tell her she is very incorrect and if she checked her own shelf she would find two distinct Roku products only one of which is a stick and they differ by 60 bucks each.

My wife told me I had gone too far. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Stupid should hurt a bit.

On the other hand I went to the landfill today. 4 bucks even and they couldn’t have been nicer. I might start looking for things to toss just so I can go back. lol

Sorry man…I absolutely LOATHE AT&T

AT&T can go pound sand. Was a loyal 35+yr customer but now would not accept ANY free lifetime services. ......... drill sgt.

Well that’s not reassuring. Lol. Good news is I have the wife this close to cutting the cord on cable and ditching the landline. Maybe ATT’s incompetence will be my best strategy.

Customer Service? What is this quaint antique thing you speak of?

All I experience anymore is customer nonservice.
.

quote:

pedropcola

A guess, you moved to Pcola? What area? I'm moving there next spring.

Ray

AT&T is in the Communications business. Communicating is the one thing they cannot do. Had a nightmare past few days with their internet. They do not even seem to know what the problem is. Everybody has a different answer. It is a corroded pipe to it is your modem. Finally got someone to come to the office. No problem here so he needs to talk to the line guy and maybe it will be fixed in a few days. The loss of internet basically shuts down my business. Thank God the phone works.

There are many things they can't do

Prior to January 8, 1982, AT&T actually worked. Communication quality and reliability were the number 1 priority. Central Office switching systems were designed with the goal of total cumulative down-time not to exceed two hours in a forty year service life. Customer service was handled by experienced American reps, who spoke and understood the English language. Life was good, at least in terms of a national communication service that worked.

How do I know this? After my active duty with the U.S. Navy, I cut my teeth as a young design engineer with Bell Labs, starting in 1960. The formal design practices, testing, and rigid quality control were outstanding.

Then, in 1982, the Consent Decree broke up the Bell System and everything became about the dollar instead of focusing on a system that worked, and the former AT&T disappeared.

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:
Prior to January 8, 1982, AT&T actually worked.

The AT&T of that era and the AT&T of today are the same in name only…

quote:

Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:
AT&T is in the Communications business.

Not really. They're in the money-making business. Supplying communications is a distant second.

As V-Tail noted: The original AT&T was broken-up in 1982. From there to here in broad strokes:

From shortly after that, until the late 1990's there was AT&T, which consisted of the former AT&T Long Lines division, Western Electric, and Bell Labs, and seven Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs): Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, NYNEX, Pacific Telesis, Southwestern Bell, and US West.

Over time the seven RBOCs merged until there were only three: SBC, Verizon, and Qwest.

During that time AT&T tried to expand its footprint with cable TV, cellular, and re-entering the local phone service provisioning market. It was trying to become one stop shopping. Sadly, it was never able to integrate all these products, ended-up selling them off for pennies on the dollar, and eventually failed.

Western Electric and Bell Labs had by then been spun off into Lucent Technologies. (That, too, crashed. Western Electric was subsequently acquired by Alcatel [France] and Bell Labs by Nokia [Finland].)

SBC bought the remains of AT&T in 2005 and subsequently took the name.

And, yes: The thing that calls itself "AT&T" these days isn't a pimple on the ass of your daddy's AT&T, and we hates them.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: ensigmatic,

Well all business are in it for the money. The parts of the business I use are for communication, and they SUCK. I am aware of all the mergers and in particular how poor their health plans have become.

In contrast many other businesses have improved their services and continued to make money.

AT&T are a bunch of clueless morons. We have had them for various reason at my work since the 80's. We even let them put the D mark in our building. Our account number was so old they call it a legacy account. We ask them what exactly are we paying $700 a month for. Not a single moron there could tell us, they had to send us to a special department that handles old accounts and they didn't know!

So we cancelled service and they now put us in collections! When the collection department called we said what service are you saying we owe for? They say they don't know, but we owe them the money! Told them to piss up a rope. Will be funny to take that before a judge and let them explain that we own it because!

quote:

Move is done. By that I mean one wife, one kid, 2 cats, 1 dog, and 3 cars are now safely in new home in Florida.

Welcome to Florida, and you are here in time for the weather change from WaytoHot to just Hot then cool..

ATT came through our development to lay Fiber, dug up everyone's yard, except, the 10 homes in the center island, seems they were left off the order, had to come back to install them a few weeks later, service still isn't turned on, we have DirecTV, other choice is Spectrum.

Internet is Spectrum, hoping the ATT Fiber has a decent speed at a reasonable price.

I can say that Spectrum's service has been very good for the internet.

quote:

Internet is Spectrum, hoping the ATT Fiber has a decent speed at a reasonable price.

I can say that Spectrum's service has been very good for the internet.

Switch to AT&T if you are looking for absolutely chaotic incompetence in the Customer NO-Service department.

We are staying with Spectrum because:

• U.S. based customer service, dealing with people who actually speak English and understand what we in the U.S. expect. Face-to-face customer service reps at the Spectrum stores. When I need something, I deal with a particularly friendly and helpful young lady at the store on SR 436 / Hunt Club Blvd in Apopka. She actually follows up to make sure that everything is done, and she gave me her cell phone number, told me to text her if there's anything I need.
  
  
• With Spectrum Internet service, you are eligible for their mobile service, which uses the Verizon network. If your cellular data needs are modest, the price is outstanding. We have three phones on our plan, unlimited talk and text, and a total of 3 GB data (1 GB per phone) in a shared pool -- we don't even use half that much. Total cost for all three phones, INCLUDING all taxes and junk fees, is $42.00 / month. That's $14.00 / phone.

There is no way I would ever go back to AT&T. I'd sooner use tin cans connected by a string for local service and smoke signals for long distance.

quote:

Originally posted by p08:
AT&T are a bunch of clueless morons. We have had them for various reason at my work since the 80's. We even let them put the D mark in our building.

"Demarc." It's short for "demarcation point." It's the point that establishes <their responsibility> <-> <your responsibility>. Residences have them, too.

quote:

Originally posted by p08:
Our account number was so old they call it a legacy account. We ask them what exactly are we paying $700 a month for. Not a single moron there could tell us, they had to send us to a special department that handles old accounts and they didn't know!

Does that ever sound familiar

We had the exact same thing happen to us where I used to work. The first time I went to renew our contract after SBC bought AT&T it took them months to get me a contract. During one conversation I finally asked "You don't really know what it is you're trying to quote, do you?" The guy hemmed and hawed, finally admitting "No, we don't. It's a legacy AT&T product. We don't understand it." Eventually I got bumped up the chain to somebody senior. Said to him "Let me guess: You laid off all the Hi-Cap sales engineers that came with your acquisition of AT&T and now you don't have anybody there that understands the products they sold, right?" He admitted I was right.

They finally solved the problem when they hired a sales engineer that had been with Qwest. After six months they finally sent me a contract I could sign.

Four months later they still hadn't implemented the new contract. I called. Complete befuddlement at the other end. (They had since promoted the guy with whom I'd been working out of the department and the sales engineer they'd hired from Qwest had left.) I ended-up emailing the guy I'd been working with. He dug into it. Replied "This is so screwed up it'll be easier to just cancel the new contract, extend your old contract again, and start over."

So that's what they did.

At some point in there we'd cancelled a Hi-Cap circuit we no longer needed. They couldn't figure out how to stop billing us. Finally I told them we would subtract the over-charges from the bills and pay the remainder. At some point they finally figured it out. Between refunds for over-charges and self-accessed fines they owed us over $8,000.

They never did get us a new contract. I finally solved the whole problem by ditching "AT&T" and moving everything over to Bright House Networks fiber.

When we were a couple weeks from the scheduled move, "AT&T" sent a crew out to clean up this mess:





and, in the process, took down, first one, then the second of our T1 circuits, thus killing all our phone service.

Luckily, we were ready for the move to Bright House. The fiber had been installed and I'd already temporarily cut our PBX over and tested incoming and outgoing calls on some additional numbers they'd assigned us. Called Bright House (using my own cell phone), got our project engineer on the line, he requested an "emergency cut-over and port." Three hours later, before "AT&T" had even scheduled a service call to fix the T1 circuits they'd killed, we were moved over and our phone service fully restored.

I cancelled the "AT&T" circuits before they ever got on site.

At one point I wandered over to where they were working on that rats nest. "Either of you guys Hi-Cap techs?" Nope. "Did you even know there were Hi-Cap circuits in there?" Nope.

Hi-Cap circuits look and sound to POTS/COTS techs like nothing more than noise.

Just some of the many, many sagas I could relate about the thing that now calls itself "AT&T."

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:

quote:

Internet is Spectrum, hoping the ATT Fiber has a decent speed at a reasonable price.

I can say that Spectrum's service has been very good for the internet.

Switch to AT&T if you are looking for absolutely chaotic incompetence in the Customer NO-Service department.

We are staying with Spectrum because:

• U.S. based customer service, dealing with people who actually speak English and understand what we in the U.S. expect. Face-to-face customer service reps at the Spectrum stores. When I need something, I deal with a particularly friendly and helpful young lady at the store on SR 436 / Hunt Club Blvd in Apopka. She actually follows up to make sure that everything is done, and she gave me her cell phone number, told me to text her if there's anything I need.
  
  
• With Spectrum Internet service, you are eligible for their mobile service, which uses the Verizon network. If your cellular data needs are modest, the price is outstanding. We have three phones on our plan, unlimited talk and text, and a total of 3 GB data (1 GB per phone) in a shared pool -- we don't even use half that much. Total cost for all three phones, INCLUDING all taxes and junk fees, is $42.00 / month. That's $14.00 / phone.

There is no way I would ever go back to AT&T. I'd sooner use tin cans connected by a string for local service and smoke signals for long distance.

No doubt, hoping ATT fiber causes Spectrum to get better pricing, probably not, ATT will probably charge more for Fabulous Fiber..

Yea so far their performance has been underwhelming.

Pcola was from a couple decades ago. Lol. Now it’s more like pedrocentflor. Doesn’t have much of a ring though.