AT & Bloody T

Why can't life every be simple? I suppose it could be argued that that would take the fun out of the whole thing. My latest challenge is our great tecom provider AT&T. I used the phone yesterday morning and everything was fine. I had an interview arrainged with Christian Torres of Los Difuntos scheduled for 1 5pm live radio broadcast, so as usual 15 minutes before we go on the air I dial into New York to get the show staged up, with Christian dialing in 5 minutes later so we can go over the format of the show before we hit prime time.

To my absolute horror I discover a terrible buzzing sound on my damn phone line. In a race to fix the problem I change phone cords, hand sets, and DSL filters. No damn go! Maybe its the DSL modem? So I reboot my computers, the modem, and the router. Still no go. It is now two minutes to air time, poor Christian is sat listening to dead air! I dial back in, and with 90 seconds to spare get the show set up.

Damn humming persists throughout the entire broadcast but luckily it is fairly indistinct on the recorded version.

So I get on the phone with AT&T and after playing twenty questions with the voice activated annoyance system that AT&T employ to dissuade customers from being able to report problems, I finally get a human. This numskull asks the same twenty questions and finally asks me what the problem is. "Can't you hear the damn problem" I ask him. "Oh, all that noise on the line, yeah that would get old" is the helpful reply.

So the unhelpful tech writes up a trouble ticket and drops the bombshell that they likely won't get to it till Monday.

This is just great! We have a one hour talk show scheduled on Sunday!