High Dudgeon

High Dudgeon.  That’s where I’ve been for the past three days now.  As we say out here in the flatlands, madder than a wet hen.  (See left)

Pourquoi, you ask?

So Suddenlink has been sending me these promos, and Saturday I called them to see if I could get a lower price for phone, internet and TV than I’m getting now.  Turns out I could.  That’ll be $165.14, thank you very much — first month’s bill and $45 installation fee.  The tech was scheduled to come out Tuesday afternoon.

The tech shows, looks around and sees I’ve got AT&T, unscrews plates behind the TV, puts a new doohicky on the wall, and then announces that there’s a service outage, and he doesn’t want to leave me with no (land line) phone (I also have a cell), internet or TV, tells me he’ll be back at 9 a.m. Wednesday morning to finish the installation, takes my equipment, and leaves.  Wednesday at noon, I’m still waiting for him.  I try calling their service number and am told wait times are in excess of 20 minutes.

So I get in the car and go to the Suddenlink office, which is just a couple of blocks away.  While I’m sitting in the Suddenlink office waiting for someone to wait on me, just for the halibut, I call Suddenlink on my cellphone.  I got connected on the phone within minutes.(!)  So I’m talking to Suddenlink’s technical support person while sitting in the Suddenlink store waiting for their one working customer service rep to wade through the 7 people ahead of me.  The lady on the phone says they’ll send a tech out.  So I go home.  The tech comes.  He can’t do anything because he’s a repair tech and the install tech took my equipment with him when he left.  So I try the Suddenlink phone number again.  Callers are warned that wait times are in excess of 20 minutes and they’re taking call back appointments — press 1 for Thursday the 5th, 2 for Friday the 6th . . . .  (No, I’m not making this up!)

So Thursday, after my dentist appointment, I go back to the Suddenlink store.  There is one person taking payments, two people helping customers, and about 9 customers ahead of me on the list waiting to talk to a customer service rep.  You have to sign a list to be seen, so I sign in.  In the meantime, I call Suddenlink on the phone again.  I held for upwards of 20 minutes, but somebody finally answered.  I go through my tale of woe to one person, who then transfers me to another person, and I have to repeat my tale of woe to them.   All she can do is send an email to the install team telling them what happened.  Then I wait for them to call me so I can reschedule.  I gave them my cell phone number and continue to sit there.

The SUPERVISOR comes in to start helping with the backlog, calls my name off the list (turns out I’d been there long enough for the 8 people in front of me to be served)  I went through the whole spiel yet again.  She writes another email with all the gory details, but she copies it to the VPs of one thing and another.  She also gives me her business card and instructions to call her if nothing happens.

Home again, home again, and I have some lunch.  At 2 o’clock, I get an automated phone notification that, “A technician is on the way.”  Which I will believe when they actually plong on the doorbell.  In the meantime,  I’d just gotten the latest Liaden Univers™ novel, “Accepting the Lance” by Steve Miller and Sharon Lee, so I’m sitting in the living room, within lunging distance of the front door reading it on my Kindle Fire tablet.

The clock strikes 4:00.  Still no tech.  I’m in the process of calling the supervisor on my cell to apprise her that there is still no joy in Mudville, when the land line rings and it’s the tech.  SHE shows up at about 4:30 and proceeds to set up my service — bang-bang-bang-bang, and she’s done.

And everything works!

So I’m exhausted, way out of sorts, and feeling a lot like John Cleese in the dead parrot sketch.  I had to rattle cages Tuesday afternoon, all day Wednesday and most of Thursday afternoon to get what I paid for.  Now I’ve got to go change the WiFi access on two internet radios, a tablet and my cellphone.