Come on AT&T
I awoke to no wifi. Tragic enough, I compounded this problem by
willingly subjecting myself to AT&T’s support. You see, the U-Verse
gateway was without power and having tested it on other outlets I
pronounced it dead. Ergo, willful contact with tech support.
Contacting support is different when you know what you’re doing. It’s
even more different when you’ve been in their position before and have
been in the position of hiring them before. What should be a
relationship of trust quickly devolves into “oh no, not that line
again” as one picks up on the boundary between training and
independent thought.
This poor fellow was all training.
I announced the predicament and all prior troubleshooting proudly and
with a certain finality. Having done this before he should trust a
being of superi- you need me to reset the settings on the device? Of
course you can’t see it; it won’t turn on. I can’t turn it on, that’s
the problem, Apu. No, don’t do a line test. It’s not plugged into the
line so that won’t do a thi- Right, fine, I’ll hold. Can’t start the
day right without early-career Celine now can we?
This is one of those moments when you realize someone with a C average
is called tier one.
After some banter with me throwing around difficult concepts such as
customer competence we agree to mail me a device overnight. Hooray.
Then he calls back. He can’t order the device due to unknown problems
with the system, but after further tests he found a problem with the
lines outside and will send a tech to look at them and then decide if
I need a new gateway.
Wait, wait, wait … what? Apu, the device has no power. How are
outside phone lines an issue? It’s not plugged in so of course you see
a problem. Is it the local loop or your connection to the VRAD? V RAD.
The box on the street corner. -sigh-
Lost that battle. So here I sit, waiting for the tech to arrive. To
deliver a box because he couldn’t order one and his training forbid
him from saying the entirely obvious: my system won’t let me mail it,
so I’m sending a courier to hopefully deliver it.
Language skills are under-rated these days.
