It is the cry of women

The economy must be good. How else can people who suck at customer service keep their jobs? Service is even worse when you're dealing with a monopoly like the cable or phone company: they are allowed to blatantly not care whether you're satisfied because you're pretty much stuck with them anyway.

I have been cooped up in the house for 3-1/2 days because I've been sick with the flu (or cold, or some kind of crud). I decided to run some errands this afternoon because the weather was nice and I was feeling a little bit better. I came home at 2:00 to find that my Internet connection had been down for about an hour. This may not seem like a big deal to most people, but I work from home. Not only that, but I am on call for this long holiday weekend. I'm still not feeling great. And going into the office isn't an option since "on call" means 24 hour coverage. And even if I wanted to spend the weekend at the office, it's 680 miles from here.

After switching from wireless to wired, doing a power cycle on both the cable modem and our router, and connecting to our router from my PC to make sure it wasn't the problem, I called my husband at work to see what a blinking power light on a cable modem means. The diagnosis: "You're screwed, call the cable company."

After being cycled through their automated phone menu twice and keying in my phone number twice, I got a human being who promptly asked me for my phone number. (Argh! The phone company does the exact same thing, and they already know my freaking number!) Anyway, I finally got to tell someone that I can not connect to the Internet.

Assuming I am an idiot, the customer service rep began to read off the script before I could even tell her what I'd already done to troubleshoot. I at least got to avoid one trip to the basement (where the modem is... and I don't have a phone down there) when I was able to tell her that I already cycled power on both the modem and the router. Either she didn't believe me that I can communicate with the router from my PC (my husband is a network nerd: he taught me), or didn't know what that meant, since I next had to drag my laptop downstairs to plug it directly into the cable modem, even though my previous trouble-shooting showed that the router was not the problem. After that didn't work, next on the script was "Are you free next Thursday between 1 and 3?"

Sometimes my frustration level is such that I can barely keep the emotion out of my voice, and I sound as if I'm going to cry. That is an extremely useful quality to have when on the phone with customer service reps who don't care. I can't cry on demand like my sister can (gets her out of speeding tickets), but on the phone I can sound like a big bucket of hysterics is welling up just beneath the surface, and one more drop of "I don't give a damn" will cause it to blow straight through the phone like the Taum Sauk Lake.

There were several back-and-forths:

Rep: "You should have a business account if it's mission critical."
Me: "A business line gets a different signal that would be working right now?"

Rep: "Can you go to a friend's house to use their connection?"
Me: (incredulously) "Invite myself to somebody's house for Christmas weekend so I can use their Internet connection?"

Rep: "We are having lots of trouble calls in your area already today and all our technicians are already out with someone else."
Me: "So you're saying there's an outage that's already being worked on? Maybe whatever they are fixing will fix my problem."
Rep: "No, they haven't declared an outage."

It became evident that I was going to be a pain in the butt if she didn't at least pretend to do something, so she sent me running back down to the basement several more times to try different versions of "unplug this" and "plug in that." Finally, after about 50 minutes on the phone and several power recycles, my Internet connection suddenly worked again. The problem was on their end: they didn't have my modem "provisioned" or something like that.

I will admit the customer service rep was polite and professional throughout, but that didn't really make things better. If there are other things a rep can troubleshoot over the phone, why is the preferred course of action to blow off (and piss off) the customer and make an appointment to have someone come to my house a week from now, when it is something that was fixable over the phone in less than an hour? And why does a customer need to be on the verge of tears before a customer "service" rep actually does something besides put you in a queue? I had a very similar experience with my washing machine manufacturer a couple months ago.

A typical call center costs a company about a dollar a minute per call. Had the rep gone through all the possible troubleshooting measures first instead of trying to sweep it under the rug, we could probably have resolved the issue in 30 minutes, less if she would have not assumed I'm an idiot and taken my word that it wasn't a router issue because I had already checked. $30 has to be cost them less than sending out a technician.

Of course, I know the answer to that because we were dealt with by our old cable company in much the same manner. They'd say there is nothing they can do, make an appointment for some date far in the future, then a few hours later the problem magically "fixes itself." Then it becomes the customer's responsibility to cancel the technician's visit, and they can treat the whole matter like it was all in your head to begin with.

I suppose I could try DSL, but believe it or not, the local provider is even worse. Their idea of customer service: "Since you're calling because we screwed up the service you purchased already, how about buying another one of our crummy services, too? We're running a special."