I thought it was impossible to be worse than French bureaucracy.  I really did.  But AT&T has done it.  They embody a whole ‘nother level of incompetent.

It started with the move to a new house.  We were in the dark ages for a solid week waiting for the technician to come connect our new house to the Internets, and that was only after pulling some strings to get them to move up the install date.  We didn’t change service or anything, just location.

We then decided to cancel our service and save some money by having a different roommate sign up for a new user promotion.  It’s totally legit.  Like intelligent people, we planned far in advance to cancel on the 10th and scheduled an appointment for the new service to get installed that same day.  No more dark ages for us!

But…they cancelled our service 2 days early, on the 8th.  Because AT&T is incompetent.  We had a technician come out that day, on the 8th, because we originally thought it was a technical problem.  He confirmed that it wasn’t.  And of course he doesn’t have access to our account to unblock it, because no one in that freakin company talks to each other.

This is the ridiculous conversation I had with someone who probably wasn’t named Robin:

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The empathetic part of me understand they’re trying to do their jobs but MAN it’s hard to remember that when the incompetence is just rampant.

At this point we’re all super frustrated with the whole AT&T system and not getting anywhere.  So we suck it up for 2 days since the new service is supposed to start soon.

And then the 10th rolls around, when our new internet installation was supposed to happen… and the technician never shows up.  Apparently AT&T changed the appointment to the 19th without notifying us.  Bastards.  That’s just mean.

Will spent a day on the phone with AT&T, making his way up the chain of command until he found a seemingly important manager, Jeff.  Jeff sounded like a really nice guy, very sympathetic.  He listened to our story and promised to expedite our process.  We’d have internet installed within a day or two, with cable coming later.  Fine.

And then:

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Will almost threw his phone out the window at that point.  I mean, this is an inherently and deeply flawed system.  What kind of company gives total access of a customer’s account to one single person!?  How can a manager not override that!?

So Jeff promises to call back the next morning after getting the sales representative to unlock our account… and he never calls.  Whomp whomp.  Summer, Stan, and Shelley also promised to call back at various points in the process and never did either.  Never date anyone from an AT&T call center.

We think that Jeff’s job is basically to just talk people down from a state of immense frustration and then never get back to them.  I mean, it totally worked.  We totally believed that he was going to call us back and figure things out.  Scalawag.  Rapscallion.

In other news, we’re switching to Comcast and they came yesterday!  I’ve heard bad things, but my experience was pretty freakin great.  More on that later.  Suck it, Jeff.