You have probably read some of my adventures before with being an AT&T wireless customer in Chicago. (Read here, or here) My issues have been continuous since becoming a customer.  Why not change companies? It is hard to pay for a new phone when your finances are challenged. Once money is no longer an issue I will change to Verizon gladly.

So I have had more issues with dropped calls, poor voice quality that I couldn’t understand what they were saying, delayed texts/voice mail up to 8 hours later, wildly fluctuating signal and more that I can’t remember. I was talking to my friend and couldn’t understand what she was saying even with 4 out of 5 bars, so I called her back. Still couldn’t understand her so I asked her to call me back. While waiting for her call she IM‘s me and says that she is calling and its going to voice mail and why aren’t I picking up? I tell her that I didn’t receive any calls, or notice from the phone that I had a voice mail. I turn off the phone and wait 30 seconds and turn it back on and call her back. That fix usually works, but not all the time.

I called AT&T the next day and explained my problem to customer service. Then transferred me to technical support. Since I have called in almost every month my file was big. “I can see you have had lots of issues and there are a ton of notes on your account,” the technical support rep said. “Technical support will call you back tomorrow on Thursday.”

I was called Thursday at 6:30 at night and spoke with technical support. They wanted me to go to the local corporate office immediately “It would be best to go asap,” she said. I said that the store would close in a half hour and that I had to walk there late at night and I would prefer to go tomorrow. So we both looked up the time and I asked her to call me back tomorrow morning. “I can’t call at specific times, I will call you on Tuesday and find out what happened.” It was actually my suggestion to go to the corporate store because she said that they needed to do troubleshooting with the phone itself and that they could only get me to a second level support if I could call from another line.

So Friday I go into the Corporate store at noon. I knew this was going to take two hours and they didn’t let me down. After speaking and repeating everything that has happened to me the last 2 years the technical support person said that she has to move me up to “Level 2.” Ok, at that point I had been there 90 minutes.

“Hi this is John with Level 2 technical support, how may I help you?” he cheerfully asks.

I tell him my story.

“We need an example where this problem happened.” he says. I tell him the exact time and date.

“Oh I see what happened. Yes there is a problem.” then the next thing he said shocked me. “I’m sorry I can’t help you.”

“You can’t help me?” I said stunned.

“That’s right. We have a policy that to enter a case the cause of it has to happen in the last 48 hours. Since that is out of this period we can’t do a network trace.” he said.

“Let me get this straight. I do what the representative tells me and come here and you are telling me that I can’t get helped because I am too late for the policy?”

“Yes I am sorry but that is the policy.”

Oh this is not what I expected to happen. “Let me talk with your manager.”

“My manager will say the same thing but you are welcome to talk to him.” he said.

So I spoke with the manager and he said the same thing. I explained how I was following the instructions that AT&T technical support gave me to come to the corporate store and repeated the last 2 years of issues. He said he would open up a network case to do a “network trace” and gave me the number.

I went home pleased that I got something done. The next phone call I got was from a recruiter. It had poor voice quality and the call dropped. I called AT&T technical support back and told them the time that it happened and my case number and was told it would be applied to my case.

Bottom line: if you have a problem with AT&T let them know ASAP.