By Cynthia W. Gentry, © 2000 by Cynthia W. Gentry, published on Dailygossip.com, July 2000.
A new ballpark stands beside San Francisco Bay. Everything about it works: its views, its layout, its food and most importantly, its restrooms. Yes, everything about PacBell Park says careful planning and attention to its patrons’ needs.
If only PacBell could do the same with its primary business, which I thought was providing telecommunications. Silly me.
Oh sure, I have a dial tone on my phone. But when it comes to its much-advertised Internet services, Pacific Bell is to quality Internet service as the Titanic is to pleasure cruising. Think I’m exaggerating? Let me take you to my own Seventh Circle of Hell: PacBell DSL.
Believing the hype and wanting to establish myself as one of the few gadget-heads with fabulous highlights, I signed up for Pac Bell DSL last October. Sadly, I ignored the dark rumblings from people like my friend Magnus, who warned me like some oracular Norse God that he’d heard nothing but bad things. But I was tired of fighting my dial-up account. I wanted fast, reliable Internet access. I had discovered jcrew.com and one-click buying just wasn’t cutting it on a modem.
And fast, reliable access is what I had for a while with DSL. In fact, in a stunning act of hubris, I even changed my e-mail address. But like Icarus, I’d flown too high.
First came the e-mail problems. I stopped being able to download e-mail for days at a time, which, I was to discover, was a common problem for those using PacBell for e-mail. When my e-mail finally came, like an errant husband stumbling in at 4 a.m. reeking of whiskey, I could never be sure that I’d received all of it. Yet my Internet access itself seemed to work fine.
Then, on Thursday, June 22, I turned on my computer and discovered I could no longer access the Internet through my DSL line. And so began a three-week nightmare. Naturally, I called PacBell immediately, because naturally, these sorts of problems only happen when one is on deadline. The technician walked me through a few tests, and declared that the problem was with the network card that PacBell had installed in my computer. I knew very well that it wasn’t, as I couldn’t access get Internet access though my networked laptop, either.
So I called the next day, got a different technician who couldn’t solve my problem either, but said that he would “escalate” my problem and that I should expect a call in a few days. (I have since come to believe that “escalating” problems is a euphemism for “taking the elevator up a floor to my friend Joe’s cube and laughing at the gullibility of PacBell DSL customers.”)
I called back on Monday, and the chipper technician who answered told me that it takes 24 to 48 hours to escalate problems and that I should call back on Wednesday if no one had called me first. Of course, on Wednesday, no one had, and a woman named Gracie told me that I had been kicked off the router—for what offense, no one knew. But Gracie assured me that they would prorate my bill to adjust for my DSL-free time.
That night, I began to discover the brotherhood (or sisterhood) of PacBell victims. Over several glasses of Zinfandel, two of my best friends related how they had been able to solve their problems with PacBell only because they had “contacts.” In other words, someone in a totally unrelated PacBell department had had mercy on them. I had no such “contacts.” I felt very alone. “But they escalated my problem,” I told Pat. “It doesn’t matter,” she replied ominously. “They don’t care. They just don’t care.”
I rose early the next day and called PacBell again. And Pat’s words came back to haunt me: “Roger” (no doubt a pseudonym) told me that my problem had never been escalated at all. Yes, he would escalate it again, but now I should expect 72 hours to pass before someone called me. I pictured his co-workers sitting around him, laughing merrily at my distress. In the meantime, he ran me through all sorts of tests that involved me crawling on the floor around my modem reporting back to him on things like whether the “10BaseT light was on.” Again, I was sure that he was putting me on mute while he and his fellow technicians guffawed.
After hanging up with Roger, I e-mailed Dan Gillmor, the technology columnist at the San Jose Mercury News and suggested that perhaps submitting PacBell to public shame would get some action. He replied immediately. “We’ve done many articles on this, but it doesn’t seem to help,” he said. I had a sudden sense of what life must have been like under Communist rule.
At this point, I decided that the best strategy was to call PacBell daily. On Friday, June 30, more than a week after my Internet access had mysteriously stopped, I managed to reach a technician named Michael who spent nearly two hours on the phone with me trying a battery of tests that left me well prepared should I ever want to program a missile to hit Iraq, but failed to solve my DSL problem.
Poor Michael kept putting me on hold to speak to a “senior technician,” also known as a “STAQ” (Subvert Trust and Quality?), but the best they could do was tell me that the router I was on was “having problems” and that I was “breaking up at the redback.” This sounded suspiciously like what my ex-boyfriend Beelzebub had done to me several months before. Then I remembered that he was also a PacBell Internet subscriber—a problem-free one. In my delirous state, I began seeing a connection…Lack of a soul…lack of trouble with Pac Bell….
It was probably a line issue, Michael informed me, snapping me out of my reverie. And that meant he couldn’t help me, and that I had to call YET ANOTHER NUMBER. After six calls to PacBell Tech Support, I was told I had to call DSL maintenance. I heard Pat’s voice in my head… They don’t care… They don’t care … They don’t care…
I went on vacation for a week, and hoped that when I returned my DSL would be magically restored. Believe me, the odds were better on the slots at Vegas. I called DSL maintenance today. “Laura” asked me the same questions that every other technician thus far had asked me (“Is the 10BaseT light on?”) and then filed a trouble report. Someone would call me in 24-48 hours, she assured me. I felt my eyes roll back into my head.
In the meantime, I’d received my monthly PacBell bill. Sure enough, I was being charged for the DSL service I hadn’t been receiving. I called the oxymoronically named “PacBell Customer Support,” where a woman named “Tiara” (I’m not making this up) told me she could help me and transferred me before I could protest. The phone then rang for 10 minutes. I timed it.
Finally (and yes, this story is drawing to an end, for now), “Mike” answered. I explained in no uncertain terms how I did not want to pay for service I wasn’t receiving, and shut him down when he started to transfer me back to DSL Maintenance. He then put me on hold and when he came back, he told me that someone would call me back in two business days. I imagined posters all over the PacBell offices: “Two Business Days: Say it With a Straight Face.”
Then came the piece de resistance. He actually tried to sell me more PacBell services.
“I notice you don’t have any Custom Calling Features on this line,” Michael said. “Are you interested in—”
“No!”
“How about the Messaging—”
“Look, Michael,” I said, struggling to pick my jaw off my desk, “I am extremely unhappy with Pacific Bell at the moment, and I have a friend at a local TV station is planning to do a story on how bad your service is. I do NOT want to be sold more services.”
“Oh, OK,” he said, giggling.
I’m not alone in my pain, nor have I suffered the worst. My cousin’s wife was without DSL for over a month before she cancelled her service. Luckily, she didn’t have to pay a cancellation fee: PacBell forces you to commit to one year of DSL service—a sort of indentured servitude for the cyber-literate.
Someone from DSL maintenance did call me, the next day, and on Thursday, July 13—three weeks after I lost DSL access—two young men appeared at my door. Forty-five minutes later, I had DSL access once again. Just think of the time and money it would have saved all of us—me, Gracie, Roger, Michael and Mr. STAQ—if they’d sent me to DSL Maintenance in the first place. (I still haven’t heard from the billing office, of course; that should be my next battleground.)
One of PacBell’s many clever advertisements ends with the tagline “Once again, the phone is your friend.” Friend? More like a boyfriend who pursues you until you’re hooked in, at which point he avoids you, promises he’ll call and then doesn’t, lies to you and torments you until you break, all the while claiming he did nothing wrong. And you keep giving him one chance after another. Someone will call you in two business days. I did not know we were selling arms for hostages. I slept with you because I wanted to feel closer to you.
Well, kids, I’m done with the Bad Boyfriend School of Customer Service. I’m prepping for my TV appearance, and setting out to prove that the pen is mightier than the Endless Voicemail Jungle. Got a PacBell horror story? Send it to me. We’ll wrap them up in a bright Nordstrom bow and send it off the California Public Utilities Commission.
Anyone got Erin Brockovich’s number?