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"There's nothing else I can do to help you," the AT&T Technical Support guy said to me after an hour of frustration in trying to connect my new laptop to the wireless network in my home. 

"What do you mean?" I asked in exasperation.  Am I actually being dissed by the tech guy?

"You're going to have to take the laptop back to where you bought it and have them help you with it," he said obviously in a hurry to get off the phone with me.

"But what are they going to do?  We're talking about my wireless internet not working, so I should be talking to you!  There's nothing wrong with the laptop! I just took it out of the box!  It's brand new!"  At this point in the conversation I'm at my very last ounce of patience. 

"Well, you could have a virus and that's why it's not connecting," he answers.

 

Wondering how it could be possible for a brand new laptop to have a virus, I finally just hang up the phone with AT&T's technical NON-support guy and start thinking about which company I should switch service to.  It wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't spent another hour before that with AT&T's cell phone customer service trying to get a bill straightened out. 

It gets to a point where a company becomes so big that they have a gazillion different departments and a gazillion different numbers to contact them.  When I was attempting to contact AT&T DSL technical support, this is the number I found...

 

When I called this number, I ended up in IVR hell where I was prompted (by a robot, of course) to press a number to be connected to the department I wanted.  Three transfers later I'm informed by an agent, "Oh, we have a separate number for AT&T DSL in California."  Wow, really?  I have to call yet another number?

When I first started this article, I wanted to add a "What can AT&T do to improve" angle to it, but isn't it pretty obvious?  Isn't this the story of our lives when dealing with big corporate giants and their customer service?  Does AT&T know that this is a problem that customers have?  I'm sure they do.  Even the technical support guy told me that the common complaint from customers was this issue of being transferred from department to department.  "They (customers) don't realize that we're our own separate entities - little small companies within a huge company," was what he said. 

The sad thing is we've come to accept that this is just the way it is.  I even blew off writing a letter to AT&T headquarters because of the "Oh-they'll-just-ignore-it" attitude. 

Sad.  So sad.