Unruly Behavior

There is no such thing as a good ISP.

They all suck.

AT&T is doing their best to ruin my week, and it is only Monday.

So, here is the deal:

Customer moved from one house to another. Somehow instead of getting a move order on their DSL, they ended up with a new install. Nobody knew about this till Friday, when their DSL just stopped working. They had been using their old DSL login at the new location. It was terminated for being unbillable. Now, this is no ordinary household, they have business lines and about 8 phone lines and a real phone switch. This complicates DSL, and as a result they only have one line that can have DSL.

So, to fix this problem, AT&T cannot just move one DSL account to the number they are using. They have to cancel the new DSL account. Then they have to get the old DSL circuit moved. This will result in about a week of no DSL to their house.

Now on top of this, it is almost impossible to get through to the right person at AT&T to work on this problem.

The first number I tried:

877-722-3755 - this is a support number, they cannot help me getting the account setup properly, they will transfer me to billing for the state of Texas region. After several minutes on hold, they came back to tell me that they are having issues with their equipment, I can call:

866-224-4332 - called this number repeatedly, it is always busy, thus useless.

So I went to the att.com/1299 website and found the following number:

800-464-7928 - They are the ones that told me that the only option is for the customer to be down for 8 days to get this problem resolved. They also gave me a different number to call them back:

888-722-9337 x809 - So I called them back to ask some additional questions. This is a support number in Japan from what little Japanese I know. Great, way to go AT&T. So I called again to find about merging the two DSL accounts into one so that they could keep their old e-mail and just use the new login. Billing couldn't answer this question, so they transferred me to ASI for second tier support.

Fially, someone that knows what they are doing, after 75 minutes on the phone, a tech that can do what I want, even though other techs and billing said it could not be done.

It took ASI about 30 minutes to make the changes. So, all in all, I have nearly 4 billable hours in a ticket where the actual fix took 30 minutes.

At least I'm done with AT&T for now.

Labels: bad support, isp, work