Your Call Is Important To Us

Yeah, right.

And all the agents are “busy helping other customers?”  I bet.

But hang on! They’ll get back to me “as soon as possible” — which isn’t, I suppose, an outright lie: “possible,” in this sense, means whenever they get good and ready.

The worst lie, of course, is: “We’ll be with you shortly.”

By any definition, waiting 10, 20, 30, 40 minutes is not “shortly.” It’s a bloody long time, especially when you’re trying to get a problem fixed that happened four days ago — that you didn’t cause!

Really maddening when it’s your parent’s phone that went dead: at their ages you don’t want anything near them even getting sick.

In the time I had to wait for an AT&T agent, and not just any agent, mind you, but an Escalation Specialist (!) I did my nails and wrote my blog. And tried not to get bitter.

When I finally got Heather, my very own Escalation Specialist ( how many of you can say that), she repeated what the original agent, Diego, a non-specialist, although very polite and probably cute, had said. It was the same old song and dance (accompanied by that mucousy music they play while you wait) that all the other agents, named and nameless, had been giving me all along:

•There was a snowstorm.

•They had a “high volume” of calls.

•They were doing their best.

“Your call is important to us.“

Was there ever a time when an expletive deleted was a more appropriate response . . .

Probably not, but I held my tongue. I had practice being on hold. I was learning patience. When Heather finally deigned to answer, instead of cursing, I tried Polite/ Charming, then Pleading, then Just Plain Nice, then Mildly Angry, then Livid.

Nothing worked. Maybe I should change the order of attitudes.

Sigh. I finally got Heather to agree to a definite date when service would be restored. This was a slight improvement over the original one I had gotten 4 days before. It went from: by January 7 at 8 pm to by January 6 at 6 pm.

If there’s any such thing as a small victory, then this was it. I guess.

Surprise! Surprise! Thursday at 6PM came and went, and still no phone service. So much for victory.

Heather, the Escalation Specialist, was nowhere to be found, but I did get a new Escalation Specialist, Lisa, who said she’d call back “as soon as possible” (uh-oh), and then Yvonne, via Irene, another of those you-have-to-go-through-them-first-non-specialists, who I called because Lisa hadn’t called back 2 ½ hours later.

Yvonne had the nerve to say, presumably with a straight face, “Thank you for your patience,” another of their favorite phrases, along with “You are a valued customer,” and “We value your time.”

Who writes this stuff?
Don’t they have any idea how phony it sounds?
How annoying it is?

Seven days after this problem arose, my parents, a couple of nice old people, were still without a phone. And I was on hold with Dave, the latest in a long line of Escalation Specialists, but one who seems to know what he was talking about and was checking with AT&T’s version of The Cable Guy. Oh noooo. . .It’s a cable failure affecting 3500 customers. Which they just discovered after a week.

The word “why” comes springingly to mind, does it not? But ours is not to question why, ours is just to please stay on the line. For the next available representative.

I’m happy to report that after 8 days the problem was solved and the ‘rents are okay.

But if you’ve ever had any experience like this, and who hasn’t, leave a comment.

I’ll answer it as soon as possible, in the order in which it was received. . . .