Once upon a time I got my high-speed internet service from the cable company. But it was unreliable. I kept losing my connection. Three entities were involved: Time Warner, its Road Runner subsidiary, and a third-party installation and service company. Each passed the buck to the other. The best they could come up with was that even though I live near the center of the city (and about a mile and a half from the regional Time Warner office) I was way out at the end of one of their nodes. The signal was weak. Nothing to be done. Sorry.
So I switched to DSL. Not as fast but no connection problems. Except for their (insert swearing here) e-mail server. About once a year, when the technicians do some sort of fiddling with the system, it decides it won't recognize my password. I call tech support, they claim it must be something I did, I assure them it wasn't, they eventually admit they were messing with the servers, apologize, tell me it will be X hours until service is restored, and suggest I access my messages via their clunky web mail. (Insert swearing here)
It's that time of year again. The mail server falls with the leaves. After a day of waiting for them to get their act together, I decided to call customer support. A little while ago, old Bell South merged with AT&T. Bell South didn't make it easy to find their live customer support number, but AT&T goes to great lengths to hide it. Oh, the numbers to order service are prominent on every page of their site. The number to complain? They don't want you to call. But I was determined. I found the secret number.
The friendly recorded voice told me there was an unusually high level of cranky customers wanting to chew them out, that the wait would be about a half hour. I switched to the speaker phone and went about my work while AT&T played commercials.
Another friendly recorded voice came on the line and asked me to enter my phone number. I did. The commercials resumed.
Finally a live voice came on the line. A not-as-friendly voice asked for my phone number again. I gave it again. The now-even-less-friendly voice repeated the request. As I repeated my answer, the now-not-friendly-at-all voice said, "I can't hear you," and hung up.
Rather than wait on hold again, I tried the live chat. I was 19th in line. Then 15th. Then 12th. Then 8th. Then (insert swearing here) the session timed out.
I logged back in. I was 17th in line, but this time I ended up connected to a rep. I explained the situation. She apologized, admitted they were messing with the servers, and told me to use web mail.
I tried connecting to the old Bell South site and it redirected me to a badly arranged AT&T site. I finally found the nearly hidden mail button and (insert swearing here) it sent me to Yahoo's web mail site, which is even clunkier than the old Bell South one.
After much typing back and forth I learned AT&T had cut a deal for Yahoo to handle its e-mail service. Regular e-mail was down because AT&T techies were doing the switchover. Or trying to. And, well, it might take another day or so. And, oh, I'll have to change the settings on my e-mail client in order to migrate.
When were they going to tell us about this? Or was the plan to wait for millions of customers to call wanting to know what the (insert swearing here) problem was?
The customer rep sent me a link detailing the new e-mail client settings with the caveat they might not work until some unknown time when the techies finished messing around. I set the new settings. It didn't work. I waited a few hours, double checked the settings and... it didn't work. Later, I could receive but not send. Hmmm, can't send? What if I changed the STMP server back to the Bell South one? Presto.
So e-mail is back up and running as it should. For now. Who knows what fresh (insert swearing here) they might inflict next. I can only hope the change was a case of AT&T admitting it sucked at e-mail and wanting to give its customers better service. I hope it wasn't just a matter of AT&T just wanting to cut costs while still being able to claim it offered something vaguely resembling e-mail.
UPDATE: This message popped up a little while ago. (insert more swearing here)