Yesterday, my wife called me at work and informed me – amongst other things – that our internet connection was down. I asked her to reset the modem, etc. to no avail. I figured that it was a small outage and would be resolved a few hours later when I got home.
Naturally, it wasn’t. Our DSL connection was solid but it wasn’t able to see the internet itself. It needed some glasses, in other words. So I called AT&T after conducting some tests. The first person I spoke with was apologetic (of course!) but couldn’t help me, so she transferred me to another person. That person confirmed my phone number and then couldn’t help me, so she also transferred me to another person.
The third person was apparently in tech support, though, so she was (yay!) able to help. She was following an obvious script (“What version of Windows are you using?” “I’m not; I have a Macintosh.” “What version? 9, 10…?” “10.4.” “Is that 10.1?” “No, 10.4.” (silence)) but she ultimately tested our line out. About 15 minutes later, she asked me what city and state I was in.
“Ah,” she said, “Sir, I’m sorry but your area is part of a larger outage. We expect to have things up by 9pm your time.” That would peg the outage at over 6 hours. We left for the evening, came back, and it was still down when we turned in for the night around 11:30.
Based on my experience with AT&T, I have one simple question: why not have a phone number that one can call with a voice recording stating that something major is down? It would have saved a lot of time, as well, if the person I spoke with first asked me where I lived and then looked up if my city was affected. But I guess that’s too much to ask.
AT&T, I want a credit for the 12-ish hour outage.
Posted in Everyday Life