Friday, she gets the phone swopped over, and the young scrote tells her the secret phone number to AT&T tech support that gets you to a real person and one residing in the same hemisphere.
Saturday morning was set-up, and discovering the phone-mail system wouldn't marry up. She calls the magic number and gets a robotic obfuscation phone-tree and is pretty ripshit by the time she finally penetrates the fog, only to hear a cheerful willing young man whose accent means he is obviously not in the same hemisphere. Nor is he knowledgable, as it turns out. She snapped after ten minutes with him, grabbed the gear and drove back to the AT&T store for trip number seven. I would not have wanted to be in that store when she got there; she rightfully hates being lied to.
So, she returned with the set-up being (we think) finally properly and completely done on their part. The phone works, anyway. I hope we can let this go as time goes on and things settle in again but right now I want nothing more than a company one can go to for willing service rather than this as a norm.
Two things. I'd love to send these postings describing the chain of events to the heads of these companies, or at least call their attention to what people experience and really think about having to endure them, but they have insulated themselves from us so well its impossible to penetrate the layers of goo to get any message to them. Oh, yeah, the surveys they send demonstrate their commitments to modern best-business-practices, but come on! Do they really think we believe we have a voice and they actually read these things?
Second, my social experiment was a failure and was a foolish one to embark upon rather than my usual incremental expressions of dis-satisfaction as they occur. I in my arrogance thought I was better than that stereotype of the abusive unreasonable old man I kept encountering throughout this horrid experience. Being pleasant through it all did not garner a better experience. Indeed, it made things worse because internalising the frustration became dangerous to me, all the while believing I had myself under control. I admit becoming extremely unpleasant when I could contain it no longer, and it were those around me that had to hear it. My wife only lasted two days at this before she cracked, but she was handicapped by knowing I was off the deep end and feared tipping me over again. I can't blame her.
So, I'll be the inevitable unreasonable old man. Unless someone has any wisdom on anger management in these modern times, I'm not experimenting with bottling it up ever again, certainly not in deference to what Gen-Zed (and the institutions they represent) believe are their entitlement and special needs at the expense of those far more important to me.
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