Thursday, February 01, 2007

I Must Escalate! I Must Escalate! Part II.

Back in November, I shared with all of my fine readers out there the joys of being a customer of Earthlink and their fine quality customer service. Well, the saga with Earthlink continues.

The latest saga began last Christmas. For reasons I won’t go into, mostly because I don’t fully understand them, my room mate decided she was no longer going to pay her phone bill, without telling anyone. I thought it was strange that people stopped calling the house. I soon discovered that the phone had been turned off. No big deal, the DSL still worked. Well…that was until the cord got unplugged from the wall. Once the signal was interrupted, it couldn’t be re-established without an active phone line.

Fine then. So I went and got the phone hooked back up and put it in my name, and contacted Earthlink to let them know that we have a new phone number that we’re hooking up our DSL from. Earthlink, in their creepy reassuring way, said that was fine and everything was okay, and that it would take just a short three to five business days to get everything turned back on.

This left us a bit puzzled. Three to five business days to figure out that we still live in the same house, but the phone number has changed? Ok, whatever, we have to wait three to five business days for Verizon to hook up the house phone anyway. And, of course, Earthlink promised to give us a call once everything was a go for the DSL.

Two business days pass and Verizon gets the phone turned on. Lovely, we now have internet access again after nearly a month without anything. Of course, it’s back to good old AOL dail-up, but at least it’s something. Three business days pass, no word from Earthlink. The DSL is still dead. Four business days pass, still dead. Five business days pass, and it’s still dead.

We call up Earthlink to find out what the status is on our DSL getting re-established. Earthlink says their ENTIRE DATABASE IS DOWN and they can’t find out what’s the status of anything. But again, in Earthlink’s always creepy reassuring way, tells us to call them back later that night. So we call back later that night to find out what the deal is, and their entire database is STILL down. At this point we’re beginning to think the Earthlink freaks are using hamsters to power their shit.

Six business days pass onto seven business days, and we’re still under the assumption that Earthlink will call us just as soon as the DSL is turned back on. By the eighth business day, we call Earthlink back to find out what the fuck is going on. Earthlink says that everything is good to go and the DSL is back on. We plug the Ethernet modem back up and viola! the DSL line is still dead!

So we call Earthlink back and we’re put on hold for fifteen minutes. Finally, we get a customer service freak on the line to tell us in broken English with a thick Indian accent that her name is Shirley. Yes, Shirley. Not Habibita, but Shirley. Shirley then tries to figure out why our DSL isn’t turned on. The problem is Shirley has no fucking clue either. So Shirley tries to call up some other department over at Earthlink who presumably is some kind of technical office. Technical, of course, meaning that it’s their job to feed the hamsters on the regular basis.

So Osama bin Shirley puts us on hold waiting for the tech freak to bother to pick up the phone. But you know how hard it is to feed hamsters, so the guy doesn’t pick up the phone for twenty minutes. At this point, Osama bin Shirley is worried about losing her job because she’s kept us on the phone for what’s pushing an hour now. So she lets us know that she’ll get the hamster feeder to call us back as soon as he’s free.

Fifteen minutes later Hamster Feeder calls us back. He informs us first that they have no record on file of our new phone number. When that gets his ear chewed out a bit he then tells us that the whole problem is that Verizon has yet to update their information indicating that our new phone number is coming from this address. Huh? Does this sound like bullshit to you? It’s a new freaking account with Verizon! Why would they need to update their information, since everything is up to date when the account was created and the phone got turned on?

So Hamster Feeder lets us know that we need to call Verizon and let them know to update our information. So we ask, so as soon as Verizon updates our info, how long will it take to get the fucking DSL turned back on? Hamster Feeder lets us know, that it’ll only take….yes you guessed it…a short five to seven more business days.