Wednesday, January 30, 2008

At&t iPhone Support SUCKS

My horrible horrible experience with AT&T support services once more. This was the reason I left their home service and if it were not for their lock on Apple, I would leave their cellular service too. God are they bad. I so wish I had recorded it. It was so bad that I started recording the Apple call out of fear I would have the same experience, and miss a YouTube million hit service call.

I called to ask for help diagnosing a problem with dropped calls that started 2 weeks ago.

I was transfered from Diane Hawkins, because I landed with the wrong billing group by dialing 611 using my cell phone, and no amount of pleading with her that this was not a billing issue mattered, I had to be transfered to the right billing system group.

Michelle Watkins in the right billing group, asked for my cell phone number, as that doesn't seem to follow the call around internally. She confirmed all of my info again, put me on hold asked what the problem was and put me on hold. Then transfered me to Renee Pearlson.

Renee listened to my problem and realized I need to talk to a technician, the request I made initially with Diane and then again with Michelle, and put me on hold. Then transfered me to Larry Vols. Larry was excited to help me.

Larry's apparently was tipped off to what my problem was before he got on the phone, because he knew exactly what the problem was, sees it all the time apparently. His absolute first question was how many songs do you have on your iPhone. I was caught off guard and struck dumb for a minute. Now I am a reasonable man, really I am, so I think to my self, song are all different sizes, and I have even created a single 200MB song, so size is not his question. Why would the number of songs matter about the single strength dropping out and my phone dropping calls. My brain was really squirming on this question. So in Jesus answer style I answered the question with a question. This was going to be fun.

"Why Larry is there a limit that effects signal strength?" asks Mike

"What size of iPhone do you have sir" asked Larry. Now I am a bit embarrassed that I have the smaller one. Its probably just a male penis envy thing, but I really didn't want to tell Larry I had the little one.

"Larry, why would the size of my iPhone's memory have anything to do with signal strength?" I asked becoming a little defensive I am sure.

"Well sir, just like computers things start to slow down when you start using more than 50% of available memory!" Larry boasted as if he had some super inside computer knowledge that us mere mortals could not access, but surely could understand base on his delivery. I just didn't have the heart to tell him that was only true with really crappy OS's like Windows after installing the AT&T dsl malware.

"So Larry, your telling me that fully half of the memory in my iPhone needs to remain free to maintain a usable signal strength?" I questioned in astonishment.

"Yes sir, just like computer" he kept saying "anything over that and the signal strength is compromised" Larry said confidently.

"I am running at 90% memory utilization while rendering video on my Mac, and have no trouble with my internet access at the same time on MY computer" I said in response.

"Thats your local network, this is the cell signal it different' Said Larry

"Ok Larry if you are going to stand by this statement that I can expect to see degraded performance with my iPhone if I fill the available Gigabytes of memory over half way I will need you to back this claim up. Please email me that statement if you would." I was starting to get tired it had been 25 minutes and I was losing patients.

"Sir I can't email you that information" - Larry said defiantly.

"Ok than I want a manager on the phone now, please get a manager on this call now, thank you." - a tired Mike

"Yes sir just a second" Larry returned shortly with a female sounding voice with an odd name Axel. I didn't even have enough fight in me to poke at that one.

"Yes sir how may I help you?" - Axel asked in a pleasant tone.

"Well Larry here is making some fantastic claims about the iPhone that I think Apple would be very excited to hear about. Apparently those iPhone can only use half the memory without causing problems with signal strength, and I need someone to send that statement to me in writing" - I stated my case

"Yes that is correct, we will have to put you on hold and read the manual" - Axel

"Fine do what you have to but I need that statement" - Mike

After a full 10 minutes on hold Alex and Larry came back on line.

"Sir lets try a different approach, how much free memory do you have left on your phone" - Axel asked me.

"What, why are you asking me this and how is it different. Ok listen, Larry was either right or wrong. Which was it. Is Larry making stuff up or are you sending my manual pages in email to support his claims?" I was now a full blown asshole customer

"Sir, we can not locate the information at this time. How would you like to proceed" - Axel

I took a a breath, and asked he to check for maintenance in the area of my home, and she confirm there was none. I asked her if she could see my dropped calls and she could and even had a list by day of the exact time the calls were aborted abnormally, but that was all she could tell. I found this amazing once more but it was late, had been on the phone for and hour and I was not going to make any progress, so I cut my loses and swore to leave AT&T as soon as I could unlock my phone and cancel my strangle hold contract.

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