Morning of Wednesday, March 2, 2011

I was genuinely optimistic when I got ATTNickT’s tweet.  I thought that having a “man on the inside” would speed things along and I would be happily surfing the ‘Net in a few days.  I sent my information to AT&T’s  Customer Care Social Media team in the morning before work and waited to see what would happen.  At about 2PM I got this:

Okay, so it's 2 days...wait, "business hours?" Wut?

“Power of social media” my butt.

If you are wondering why I am complaining about “2 days” I invite you to notice the two words after the number 48:  “Business hours.”  In nearly all the professional positions I’ve had, a “business day” is the eight to ten hours during the weekdays when people are working.

So, if a “business day” is 8 hours, it might be six days before I hear from somebody who might be able to fix my problem.  Heck, let’s be really generous and assume a “business day” is 12 hours: that knocks two days off the wait down to only four days.  Hold on, though!  The weekend is coming, so let’s add two days to both those guesstimates.

So I had to wait six hours to be told I’m going to have to wait 6-10 days MORE?  Those hold times spent listening to elevator music suddenly don’t seem so bad.  Admittedly, I could be completely wrong and “48 business hours” is really two days, which does makes a weird kind of sense: AT&T is a phone company, so they’ve got to be watching their various grids 24/7. I asked for clarification on what “business hours” are, but I have an feeling that I’m not going to like the answer.

I never thought I'd have to ask this

All I have learned from my experience thus far is that AT&T’s Customer Care Social Media department is only good for ‘transferring’ me to someone else who might be able to help me out.  I could have more quickly done that over the phone even with the simpleton I spoke with yesterday.

Maybe I’m just too patient, but I’m going to maintain my optimism, stick with it and see what happens.  I’m getting REALLY close to pulling the plug and calling Time Warner Cable, though.