SBC Customer Support; Just say “No” to [go to] Hell!
Today, I sat down for my morning browse only to find that the AirPort base station was scrolling the rather ominous “Looking for PPPoE Host…” message.
Ominous why? Because if a reboot doesn’t clear the problem, then I have to:
- reconfigure the modem to do PPPoE on its own
- screw with the modem admin interface to figure out if it lost settings again
- if all else fails, call SBC customer support
Now, to be fair, SBC’s customer support has always been quite helpful. Once you get to a human. The voice menu system, on the other hand, is a totally nightmarish pain in the ass.
Today, I discovered yet more pain. When it asks “Are you using Windows or Macintosh…?” and you answer with a disgusted “No” after the word “Windows”, you get bounced to the Windows tech support line.
I spoke with a very nice woman in the Indian sub-continent who insisted that I had to be bounced to Macintosh tech support regardless of the fact that it is the modem that is failing to connect. Damned tech support scripts.
Then it was off to several minutes in the droning “Please Wait” every 10 seconds purgatory. Interestingly, once connected to the Mac service center, the individual on the end of the line sounded like a native English speaker and indicated that she was in CST (maybe). Odd. I wonder what cost analysis led to such a subdivision in the call centers.
In any case, this entire exercise yielded nothing more than an indication that there is a mysterious outage in the area and that I should call an 800 number to check on case ID #7819. Supposedly, everything will be back online sometime prior to 4:30pm.
In other words, if the DSL modem shows that the failure is above the physical layer then don’t bother calling customer support…
Actually, total black whole. Estimate up time: 2 hrs. 5 hrs. 5 hrs. Now down for 24….