Off The Cuff

The Phone Company Helpless Desk Here To Serve You Better

Posted by: From Arkansas in Are You Kidding Me?, Computer Stuff, Family stuff on Nov 15 2008

Welcome back!

Yeah right. I promised the phone company that gives us DSL that I would blog about their “excellent” service and here I am. See, we have had good service from them for a while now. We have been online for many years. This particular phone company, yes I will name them in a minute, had a help desk some years ago that simply did not work at all. You would call in and they wanted you to change your settings. I do not care if you were calling to change your mind, they wanted you to change your settings. If everything was working fine two minutes before but something happened, change the settings. For a few times, since we were then new to the internet, we did that changing. At some point we realized that it was pointless to change settings and then call again and change them back to the original ones, which is exactly what happened each time. So, we wandered away and went to another company that offered some brains for help desk but it was dial up connection.

After some years, that company became shaky so we braved going back to the original company (we have a curious lack of options in this area). They offered us DSL and we, of course, took it. It was with a great deal of surprise that we found out the help desk had been reworked and now could actually….HELP! That was our experience….until now. Recently, we started having a whole lot of problems staying connected. Most of it was a problem with my laptop. My husband finally figured out that my Wifi was messed up. We bypassed it and I now have more wires than if I had a PC in front of me. Sigh. Putting in the new setup, my connection was back just fine.

Some weeks later, a few days ago, we started to have intermittent connection problems. It would go off for a few seconds and back again. That was on my laptop. Then it started to happen on the PCs as well. My husband called the phone company (and it will now be forever called the) helpless desk since the connection and the router come from them. We pay rent on the stupid thing so they need to help here. The first tech let him know in no uncertain terms that he (my husband) had no clue what was going on, that it was working just fine and he (my husband) was the problem. And after yelling into the phone at this obviously rude guy, he hung up and seethed for a while. I asked him to calmly tell me what was up, not that I didn’t know since he was talking with the helpless desk in the first place. He told me what I told you. I suggested that he talk with another tech. One of them might actually know what they were talking about. Ya never know till you try.

After almost two hours on the phone with the second tech, they realized that the only solution would be to send out a new router. And there was another call to them again, one more for the road, I guess. They gave a date. We patiently waited for the new router. Yes, I did say patiently. Not the usual with me but we did that. We did have connections sometimes. The day for it to arrive via UPS (next day air which took a week) showed but it didn’t. We again waited patiently. The next day, Friday, it did arrive. In the meanwhile, we were still having intermittent problems with connectivity. It would drop out anytime and usually at some really important moment, at least to us. That brings us up to Friday night.

New router in place, working great….until……it drops out. All of a sudden, not only do we not have a connection, it’s like the router vanished, at least according to my laptop. Not there. At all. My husband was working on his own project at the time and was not pleased either. That was around 9pm last night. The router was not connected to the internet, not connected to our computers either. A little red light on it said no connection. He called the helpless desk again. They wanted to go through the whole testing to see this and that. My husband willingly went along with it. He was on the phone for a whole lot longer than before, over two and half hours, still nothing. We were without internet connection all night last night. They gave up and suggested we wait until Monday when someone would come out to check things out. See, we figured out it had to be their equipment, they needed to fix it.

This morning, once again in the hope that someone would have a clue (silly us), he called them again. After doing more of the same thing and my husband now getting a bit irritated, the guy on the phone told him that he would have someone come to the house today but not before sometime between 4-5pm. He might get here earlier but the tech guy doubted it. He said he put in a ticket on it and they hung up. My husband wanted to be sure we had covered all the bases so he got out the old modem that did work but does not have Wifi. Once plugged in, it worked just fine. My laptop does require the Wifi. The fact is we get way better DSL speeds normally than it was capable of anyway. We now knew beyond a shadow of doubt that it was the router, both of them that was the problem. All day we waited for the repair guy to show up. Guess what? No guy. When it reached 6pm, my husband called back again. He got a woman who said that it was too late for their repair guys to be out doing that type of work and wanted to yet again do the trouble shooting. My husband asked her to look up the history of these calls. She understood.

When he told me about all this, I decided to call. Sometimes I can get somewhere when he can’t. I don’t know. It’s a gift. Uh huh. So, I called and got a woman who wanted to trouble shoot again. I told her that my husband had spent the better part of two days trouble shooting with the techs there and nothing was occurring not to mention the fact that one of the helpless desk techs promised we would have a repair guy out today. She looked it all up and wanted to trouble shoot anyway. I said no, I wanted to talk to a supervisor. She put me on hold for a while. Came back and said that the repair guys do not come out after noon on Saturdays and that we would have to wait until Monday. I mentioned that we had online business and that it was very important that we be online again and soon considering it is THEIR equipment that is fouling up. Once again she put me on hold for a while. When she came back again, she told me that the supervisor was on another call and would call us back within the hour. That was at around 6:30pm, today (Saturday). It is now 10:51pm and I am still waiting for said supervisor to call.

Now let’s tally this up a bit. We are talking about CenturyTel phone company in Sharp county, Arkansas. They are not here, of course but we are here. There were a grand total of **7** calls made to the helpless desk, only one of which was actually productive. We did get a new router. We have been lied to and treated like it was not important enough to help. Those who did try to help only wanted to trouble shoot. That once again reminds me of the old helpless desk when they wanted to change settings that did not need changing.

The reality here is that they are a big corporation and they could care less that we need their help. They could care less if we decide to seek other options since they have plenty of other customers. Even though, we have an excellent record for paying on time and getting their service as it progressed, we are nothing to them, just another payment. When we were satisfied and not calling them, they were happy with us. We have trouble and they don’t care, especially on the weekends despite their heartfelt message while you are on hold that they are there to help twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year. Unfortunately, they have not helped us except to send out a new router that apparently did not work right either.

Right now, as I sit here writing this, we do have a connection. As I said, it is intermittent. That has never happened to us before now. We have had DSL here for well over two years, possibly more. I don’t remember. All I know is that before now, they were good to us as long as we did not have a problem. At this moment, there is a ticket on this whole fiasco sitting at the company repair desk. We intend to let it sit until they do something about it. I was wondering if they would like cake at my birthday party in April or if they would still not be here to help. Lest you tell me that we have a connection now, I will tell you that it is not the constant one we are paying for, it was NOT the helpless desk that got it working and no one, not one person gave a crap about whether we were okay with any of this or not. They simply do not care. This is what we get now. Be ready for your own foray into the hell of the helpless desk in whatever company you have. I have a feeling this is not just this company.

By the way, for more information on how my husband handled the situation, click on over to his blog and read “A Nightmare On HelpDesk Street“. He told you a little more about our fun and frolic with CenturyTel Helpless Desk.

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