Major Frustration

Yup, and I wasn't at all polite,  I am usually very polite and calm when I deal with people that are trying to do their jobs and will tolerate quite a bit of delay, slowness, things just going wrong for the person etc.  That all came to an end today.  

I have been having some trouble calling my parents.  We use nothing but wireless, no land line at our house.  Every call into town was long distance so wireless replaced that.  Yesterday I kept getting an error message when I called.  Then tried with the wife's phone and got through.  The issue was immediately forgotten.  I tried to call again today and same issue.  Tried with the wife's phone, no dice.  My wireless carrier verified my phone was working fine and that they couldn't connect to my parents phone either.  They use AT&T so I placed a call to AT&T to have them check if there is trouble on their end.  Simple, right?  Not even close.  40+ minutes and at least 11 separate connections and 2 continents (Mujiber and Hajigirl), I finally get someone that can at least speak to me in a language and accent I can understand back on US soil.  Yet they still wanted me to set up an appointment for a technician to show at their house that might or might not cost them $$.  Seriously? I just wanted to report trouble.  No, I don't have their account number.  No, I don't know their account password.  No, I don't know their favorite restaurant.  No, I don't know a 4 digit number that they commonly use.  How could I know their account details?  Just call their phone and see if you connect!  Check and see if you cut off service, they may have forgot to pay their bill!  Sheesh. Apparently you can't do any of that without those details.

There is much much more to this than what I mentioned and lots of aggravation and finally raising my voice more than I have ever to anyone that is a working person.  Some would call it yelling and much of it was repeating myself.  By the time I got off the phone I was in no mood to be very civil, to anyone.  I was even a little snappish with the wife and she didn't deserve that.

It appears that if you have AT&T Uverse like they do, if the modem has a problem, your phone will too.  It isn't the old land line, it is through the internet is how I understand it.  They tried rebooting on their end and it didn't work.  It will take a manual reboot of the modem and another gadget attached to the modem, it's not a router.  My wife finally got my parents on their cell phone, which is nearly a miracle itself, while I was getting worked up.  

We are going to have to get them to leave their cell phones on 24/7 jus in case of something like this.

Since they are reaching their 90's we need to be able to check on them and they need to be able to call out, which they couldn't do.  They thought the problem was on the other end.  Not turning the phone off goes completely against their nature.  They turn thing off every time they walk away from it i.e. the computer, even if they are returning shortly.  I think you can see how important it is for them to be able to get help at their ages.  Oh and they are fine, thankfully, but I still haven't gotten the message to them I wanted to in the first place.  No, they don't text either.

Happy Trails