Have you ever been so mad you could cry? I have, and I did.
I had the bright idea to cancel our home phone service since the only people who actually call us on that number are salesman and my father-in-law. Hubby's dad lives right next door and has our cell phone numbers, so it's not as if he won't be able to contact us. And frankly I could do without the sales calls!
Canceling our home phone service consisted of calling AT&T to switch our account from home phone & internet to "dry loop DSL" only. When I placed the order, I was given a tech support number to call once our phone was disconnected so I could "re-register" our internet service. That was not nearly as simple as it sounds. I was on the phone for about an hour doing God knows what to my computer in order to somehow reset the modem for this new service. Everything went according to plan as long as I had my modem directly plugged in to my laptop. Once I disconnected that & tried going wirelessly through my router, it was a no go. The AT&T agent gave me a "Connect Assist" telephone number to call to help me with that, but she neglected to tell me that it's a FEE BASED customer assistance.
I can't remember the last time I hung up on someone, but I did that yesterday. Twice. The Connect Assist agent tried to sell me a $15 a month service plan in order for them to talk me through getting my wireless network working again. I told her flat out that it WAS working before they did whatever they did, so how is it not AT&T's fault or problem? After I told her "thanks but no thanks" I decided to call the technical assistance number for our router, thinking maybe they could talk me through how to sync the router and modem again. Apparently our router is older than dirt, because he told me it no longer qualifies for free technical assistance and he wanted to charge me $9 for a one-time service call. Will $9 break me? No. That's not the point. The point is that everything was working fine before AT&T talked me through that procedure, and now that it's not, I have to PAY to get it working again?
I was in tears by the time hubby came home yesterday afternoon. He called AT&T and got the same story, even after talking to a manager. The only other thing they could suggest was maybe reinstalling the router. Luckily I still had the disk so we tried that. Unfortunately it started asking us for all kinds of information we didn't have like an IP address and Default Gateway - and it said those were things our ISP gave us. Ha. Our ISP (AT&T) gave us nothing but headaches. I decided to go out on a limb and call a different technical assistance number for AT&T and just ask them for that information. Luckily I got the one person on the phone who was willing to help us. I don't know if it was just dumb luck that she knew what to do and did it without charging us or what, but I'm forever grateful to the AT&T agent named Kelly. She spent over an hour on the phone with us, talking me through what to do, what to change. At one point I even turned over control of my computer to her through remote access so she could work her magic. Thankfully by 5:30pm we had working internet service AND a successful wireless network again.
Whether the $40 a month we'll save not having a home telephone will be worth all of that frustration remains to be seen!
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