Musings of a West Texas Business Venture

SBC - Round One

On Tuesday, September 5, 2006, I called our phone and DSL provider, which used to be SBC / Yahoo, and is now at&t / Yahoo. I was calling to setup a date and time to move the phone and DSL to our new location, just about 15 blocks from where we were.

After searching around their website for a direct phone number, I grabbed a phone book and looked up SBC, and gave that number a call. I had been on hold for about 18 minutes when Mary got on the line. I explained our upcoming move, and she explained that we would need two different technicians to actually perform the move. One for the DSL. One for the actual phone. We initially setup the phone on Thursday, and the DSL on Friday, but Mary decided that we could do the entire setup on Friday morning. Minimal downtime! Perfecto!

Imagine my surprise on Thursday morning around 6am, when my cell phone rang from our monitoring service to tell me that our DSL line was down. It was down until 8am, when I walked into the office, and got on the phone with technician one.

After about 35 minutes of phone work, technician one walked me through getting to my modem's homepage (although she didn't know the difference between a homepage and a subnet). Time to transfer me to level two technical support. George. Technician two.

George spends roughly 30 seconds looking at my record, and decides that the DSL group took down the circuit 24 hours early, and we would be down an extra 24 hours. I explained to him that I was TICKED, and I needed someone to yell at. George gave me the number to the executive office, so I could speak with someone there. I got Sam.

Sam's phone number is: 925-973-7751 .... if anyone needs it.

Sam was nice enough to put me in touch with Deon, and Deon and I spoke about the fact that George was completely wrong. In fact, Deon claimed that our circuit was actually the problem, and was down. Tech support had completely screwed up and took the easy path out (thanks again George!) By 3pm he had our circuit back up and running, and apologized for the problems. But we were not yet out of the danger zone...

posted by Anthony Presley @ 7:41 PM