Tech Unsupport

I just spent well over an hour talk­ing to idiots who work for AT&T Broad­band. Do they have an incompetence/cluelessness test that these peo­ple MUST pass to get a job?

We haven’t been able to so much as view the “net­work sta­tus” sec­tion of their web­site, much less log in to the account man­age­ment stuff, since the final switchover from mediaone.net. I was final­ly trans­ferred to “sec­ond-tier sup­port” today. The guy repeat­ed­ly tried to tell me that the prob­lem has to be on my end, because if oth­er peo­ple report­ed the same prob­lem “it would be post­ed on the board.” I point­ed out that the first-tier sup­port had­n’t trans­ferred me or report­ed the prob­lem in any of the oth­er many times I’ve called—they just say “the web­site isn’t work­ing.” He final­ly tried what I was try­ing, and got the same error mes­sages. And FINALLY, he finds out that no, this isn’t work­ing for ANYONE in Georgia. 

Okay@mdash;so when is it going to be fixed? He does­n’t know. He kept say­ing “it’s a rout­ing issue.” Okay, so who han­dles rout­ing issues? He does­n’t know. So how is it going to be esca­lat­ed to some­one who can han­dle it? He does­n’t know. He does­n’t have a way to do that. And on and on and on. He final­ly said, “I guess it’s some tech who does it.” Gee, and here I was think­ing it was the jan­i­to­r­i­al staff.

And I rather doubt it’s JUST a rout­ing issue because he was­n’t in Geor­gia and got the same results when try­ing to use any of our fam­i­ly’s user names and pass­words. If it was just a Geor­gia rout­ing issue, he should have got­ten past it. No, it looks to me as if it has some­thing to do with how the accounts for peo­ple in Geor­gia (all brought over from mediaone.net) have been set up. But no, he’s sure it’s a rout­ing issue. I don’t think he real­ly knows what “rout­ing issue” means. He was just repeat­ing the phrase like a trained monkey.

I also attempt­ed to find out why their news serv­er is down 95% of the time. I was told that it has to be my Out­look Express set­tings. (I cer­tain­ly am NOT going to tell them that I don’t even use the damned pro­gram, but have Ham­ster set up to pull arti­cles from mul­ti­ple servers and feed them to my copy of Agent). Well, that does­n’t make any sense—I don’t make any changes, and about 5% of the time, I can actu­al­ly access the serv­er. There’s no par­tic­u­lar pat­tern to the times of day or night that it does or does­n’t work. They STILL want to check my set­tings. Okay, I humor them. Yes, it’s all con­fig­ured prop­er­ly. And then they want to mess with my con­nec­tion set­tings, which are work­ing very nice­ly. (Again, I’m not about to talk to them about our LAN, firewall/router, hubs, etc. Would­n’t be pru­dent.) Final­ly, some­body admit­ted that this prob­lem hap­pens all the time for peo­ple in Geor­gia, and nobody knows why. Nobody seems to know when it may be fixed, either.

Log­ic obvi­ous­ly isn’t some­thing they actu­al­ly respect over there. Or basic qual­i­ty con­trol. Or pride in one’s work and product.

So any­way, dur­ing the bore­dom I did the Yahoo palm read­ing thing.

Intel­lec­tu­al mat­ters are prob­a­bly impor­tant to you, and you have a nat­ur­al abil­i­ty to express your­self well. 

You have plen­ty of inner ambi­tion and so many dif­fer­ent tal­ents that you have the poten­tial to be suc­cess­ful in many dif­fer­ent fields. 

You have so many inter­ests that you may have trou­ble decid­ing which ones to pursue. 

There may be times in your life when you give in to feel­ings of sad­ness or depression. 

Your per­son­al­i­ty is dynam­ic and attrac­tive to most peo­ple. The more branch­es you find in your heart line, the more friends and lovers you will have. Your sin­cer­i­ty and com­pas­sion make peo­ple like you even more. 

There are incon­sis­ten­cies in your ener­gy lev­el, pos­si­bly trig­gered by exter­nal fac­tors or emo­tion­al changes. 

You have a basi­cal­ly strong con­sti­tu­tion and should enjoy good health most of the time. 

You were prob­a­bly giv­en a good start in life by your par­ents. This could be based on your gen­er­al upbring­ing, or on phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics you inherited. 

A major ill­ness or set­back is pre­dict­ed near mid-life. You have the abil­i­ty to recov­er from this. 

There is a strong intu­itive side to your nature, which may bor­der on psy­chic or mys­ti­cal ability. 

I feel so vir­tu­ous. I haven’t yelled at any­one all day. Of course, I’ve been alone all day, oth­er than the dog and cat. I haven’t yelled at them, either—even though the cat dash­es out the door every time I walk the dog. But I real­ly want­ed to yell at the ATTBI idiots, and I did­n’t even get cut­ting­ly sar­cas­tic. It would have been wast­ed on them anyway.

Yes, I’m in much more pain today than usu­al, due to yes­ter­day’s trip. I knew that I would be. And yes, that is caus­ing me to be grumpier.

And R’s school wants 20 BOXES of tis­sue per stu­dent! It’s on the school sup­ply list! We don’t go through that many box­es per per­son in our house­hold in a full cal­en­dar year, much less an aca­d­e­m­ic year—despite fre­quent enter­tain­ing and sev­er­al fam­i­ly mem­bers who have con­stant aller­gy stuff going on.