Battle royale with AT&T yesterday, one of my least favorite companies (because it’s always like this with them). Since we are all now working from home, I had switched our business account from a landline to a “remote only” account with just a SIM card and calls forwarded to our office manager’s home. I was really happy to get this type of account since it is only $45/month as opposed to the $200/month we had been paying for several landlines. Suddenly yesterday our office phone number stopped working completely, I guessed because we had been switched to the new system but our line was not forwarded yet. This was a bad situation because we receive much of our revenue over the phone.
I called AT&T to try to find out what was going on. However they would not talk to me without the account number (which I did not have, because they apparently switched our account to a new account number, and none of the emails from them contained it) or the serial number from the SIM card (which I had not received). I tried to gain online access to our account, so I could get the account number, but their system would not allow me to register online and told me to call them. They switched me back and forth between departments for literally hours. No amount of explaining or threatening on my part helped.
Finally they told me to go to an AT&T store to get a SIM card. This jibed with what I had concluded during the unhappy time when Mike and I were AT&T U-Verse customers – you will waste hours of time trying to accomplish anything over the phone, and the only way to get any service from AT&T is to go to their store (a large one, not a small one, where you will similarly get no service). I was incredulous that it had come to this, since I am convalescing and can barely walk, even with crutches. So Mike borrowed my mother’s wheelchair and took me out for the first time since my surgery to the AT&T store. I learned how to go up and down stairs on crutches, as this was necessary to get to the car.
At the store, after waiting, of course, with my injured foot elevated onto one of their chairs, they tried to convince us that I could not possibly have a remote-only account, they do not exist, I had to have a cellphone attached to the account, etc. This is a company where the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, to an extreme. They finally did produce a SIM card. A helpful employee did a workaround by inserting the SIM card into one of their phones and forwarding our business line to the employee’s home. Problem solved – six hours later. Though I still have no online access to our account and cannot manage it. The store folks said they would have a business representative call me … we’ll see if that happens. But just grateful our phone is working.
Daria Doering 
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