Blogorrhea Junior

Customer Service Rage

So I thought when I moved, that I'd give the "live exclusively by the cell phone" a try and see how much it cost me, compared to the two lines and a cellphone I had in Brooklyn, that averaged about $200/month, collectively. Of course, I went way over my allotted minutes on my basic plan, no surprise, which cost me about the same as the two lines minus the cell phone. So ouch. But now I know how many minutes I need, approximately, so I call up customer service on my cell phone. . . .

AT&T Wireless
P. O. Box 68055
Anaheim Hills, CA 92817-8055

To whom it may concern:

I have been both an AT&T Wireless and AT&T customer for many years and I have never had the kind of nightmare experience I had this evening at approximately 6:00 PM EST, trying to phone customer service to change my billing address and upgrade my wireless plan. The word "Kafkaesque" comes to mind. (Have you read The Trial?) First, I spent no less than 20 minutes on the phone being shifted from menu to menu, entering the last four digits of my social security number and my old zip code repeatedly, only to be bounced back to the original menu each time, no matter what menu selection I made. Finally, I gave up and tried the on-line chat from the AT&T Wireless website, where I was told I had to call the customer service department because I was an existing customer. At least I was given the secret code: “just punch 0 a few times, instead of your numbers.” I was then connected within a few minutes to a very nice young woman named Shaquila, who was happy to help me until my service cut itself off. When I dialed back again, using the magic code once more, I was put on hold for a long time then connected to a young man whose name I didn’t catch, but who took way too long to get my information, then put me on hold to finish with another customer, then way too long again to find the right plan, which he then told me had 200 less minutes than advertised on your website. Mercifully, my service cut off again before we could launch into a disagreement about it. I have yet to succeed in upgrading my plan, though I did manage to get my billing address changed. How convenient for you. Don’t expect a check real soon.

Tomorrow, I will take time off of work to go see the nice people in the local AT&T Wireless store and see if I can accomplish my mission. Should that fail, I will be walking down the street to the Cingular store.

A few suggestions from a long-time customer: If your office closes at 5 pm, or your operators don’t want to talk to people after that time, your menus need to say so—long before people go through pushing multiple buttons. Either that or you need to regularly troubleshoot your menus. And you need to tell people on the menus that 0 will get you a real person, if all else fails, though you may in fact have to pay more customer service people to handle the sudden increase in requests for human contact.

Incidentally, your web site is equally sucky. Finding information on upgrading your account is nearly impossible. This must be because you make more money when people go over their plan’s allotted minutes. There's also no listing on the drop-down menu for "complaints," for obvious reasons.

Up until now, I’ve been very happy with AT&T, but that was some sick and stupid joke you programmed into your so-called automated customer service. After tonight, I’m seriously thinking about marching over to Cingular anyway, except that I’m sure their customer service isn’t any better than yours. And that’s the crux of the matter: None of you really give a shit about your customers, unless we fail to pay you. You’ve definitely lost my good will and my free word of mouth advertising. And the minute my DSL is installed I’ll be switching everything to the internet phone service, Vonage, as fast as I can get out of my contracts, which is not fast enough.

Very Sincerely Yours . . .

Addendum

Today (2/24/04) it took me about 10 minutes to get a rep on the phone, change my plan (with the right number of minutes), and get signed up for the new free phone every twelve months. Go figure.

Addendum

So last night (4/10/04), I go to pay my bill online and discover I have a $1,200 phone bill for two months. Dimwit has forgotten to give me the free nights and weekends on my account that I was promised. (I know for a fact I was supposed to have them because I asked specifically what time "nights" started and had a conversation about how they might start at 7 instead of 9 when Cingular buys AT&T Wireless.) It takes me an hour of insisting to the third customer service rep that some mistake has been made. Where are they finding these people? If this is what comes of outsourcing, it's even more evil than I thought it was. I spoke with Darlene, who gave me the confirmation numer 14105053.

Addendum
Fifteen days and a second phone call later (4/25/04), my bill still has not been readjusted. On top of this, there are $200 in taxes on this bill that I'm expected to pay because AT&T screwed up. I don't think so. Why I should pay taxes on their mistakes is beyond me. Let them eat it. It's their mistake. Tonight I spoke with Erica A., whose number (Whatever that means. The Number of the Beast?) is 0219.

Leaving Brooklyn

. . . Was easier than I thought it would be. So far, I'm not suffering any nostalgia, even though the first week was no picnic. It had odd parallels to my first week in Brooklyn, in fact. Then, I had no electricity for the first week (and how young and stupid was I to put up with that?), no furniture, no gas in the stove, just hot running water. Here, I spent the first week with no stove or refrigerator and workmen running in and out finishing up the painting and plastering. The new stove and fridge are great, but one of the knobs broke on the stove, so I only have three burners, just like my old one in Brooklyn, until I get a new set. That's almost funny: doomed to three burners.

Otherwise, the move went very smoothly, with minimal breakage: three bottles of booze and a cheap glass vase. The only really painful loss was my half-full bottle of Glenmorangie Port Wood Finish single malt. If there hadn't been glass shards everywhere, I'd have licked what was left off the other bottles. Last weekend, Kath & Lou and Missy shlepped up my daybed, which turned out to be enormous and really beautiful. On top of that, they helped me unpack and move boxes around so the place looks much less like a warehouse than it did. I'm down mostly to books (40 boxes) and decorative stuff, and a few odds and ends for the office and final closet that needs to be painted.

So far, the only two rooms that are more or less done are the kitchen and bathroom, and even the kitchen still needs drawer and cupboard pulls. I need to paint everywhere else, but I'm doing that bit by bit.

What I've been up to mostly, this weekend at least, is walking around the neighborhood, which is both similar to and very different from my old one. The weird thing about it is the Parkchester development itself, which feels almost like a college campus to me. I often dream about going back to Chatham when I'm feeling really insecure because that was such a safe and cozy place for me, and this feels a bit like it. Outside the actual development, it's a mix of smaller apartment houses, some of them very nice, some not so, and single family houses similarly mixed in quality. The streets around the development are a weird mix of new immigrant barrio, like Sunset Park, and ferociously kept up, established middle class housing; tiny cheap "boutiques" and chain stores; botanicas, independent pharmicies, and Duane Reade. Even the Chinese restaurants are a funny mix of greasy take-out and swankier sit-down. One cool thing I discovered in my wandering was a big new Chinese grocery store opening up just a couple blocks away. And I've found the all important drop-off laundry, just two blocks away and 15 cents a pound more expensive than my delivery man.

Because I had no stove or fridge for the first week, I ate out, mostly at the two diners on the two ovals: Ellie's just off Hugh Grant Circle and the Metro Oval Diner on the (obviously) Metropolitan Oval. I ate breakfast at Ellie's mostly, because they were huge and cheap and good, but the one night I ate dinner there I sat in the window watching the subway go by and feeling like I was in an Edward Hopper painting like Nighthawks, or something. Ellies still has one of those indented counters, like the old Chock Full o' Nuts diners used to, and it's always packed. On weekends, there are two counter waitrons: a beautiful young hispanic woman named Maria, and the "head" waiter, lightly flaming in his white turtleneck and barking out orders to the guys at the grill in diner lingo that I still don't understand. The only New York dinerese I've managed to pick up is "coffee regular" (that's with milk and sugar, to the rest of you). The Metro Oval Diner's a little swankier, as far as diners go, but it's got the shorting neon in the windows and you step down into it so you're looking up at people going by. All the waitresses call you "doll" and "sweetheart."

One slightly disconcerting fact: I've seen more cops in the last week than I saw in 17 years in Sunset Park. And when Lou and I were taking my empty boxes to the recycling center, one of them pulled up in front of us and apparently took pics, because the maintenance guy told me so this morning, when I mistakenly left a box in the incinerator room. Creepy. Helmsley management, I suspect. Ew. Not quite a gated community, but a little too observant for my taste. We'll see what other weirdness develops, if any.

Otherwise, I'm liking it here just fine. Brooklyn? That was then. This is now.