cingularly screwed

You want to know what has been diverting me recently? My frickin’ phone company.

Here’s the sitch (I’m an expert at telling the story now, due to repetition). Sailor Boy had AT&T wireless forever, but we recently decided to go with a family share plan. Due to this, we needed to re-register with Cingular and they needed to send us new phones. When they sent the new phone, they sent me one with a long distance number for my area. I called them to get MY new number changed to a local one (I called them, this is very important to remember) and int he process, the Cingular lady changed his phone number. After much ranting and railing they agreed that they would try to get it back. This was last Friday, early in the morning. At the time, they said we should have our phone number back on Monday.

Now, this is a big problem. This is the number that all of our employers have to contact us. This is the number that has been placed on all of my correspondance to editors (and I’m not talking book editors here, who would probably have the time to try email or plain old snail mail, I’m talking about newspaper editors who might be throwing me some work) and other job applicants. This is the number we’ve been giving to people to call to show us apartments. This is the number that all of our friends have, all of our family, everyone remotely connected to us… If I don’t get a job because of this clusterfuck, I’m going down to Little Rock and freak out. Sailor Boy says that since I caused this problem, I would have to call to resolve it, whihc I understand perfectly. Our mutual social phone anxiety is tough to overcome, and this one is all on me.

So, Monday came, and as you might imagine, there was no phone number. I called back, and after THREE calls in which everyone told me something different, I finally got a response that it wouldn’t be “resolved” until Wednesday. Come Wednesday, I called again and was told that a resolution would be reached by 2 p.m. At 4 p.m., I called again and was told that the only info they had was that it would be resolved “that afternoon.”

So now it’s 9 a.m. on THURSDAY. I called again — what call is this? Call SEVEN? — and the representative (one of the many, many with whom I’ve spoken), Amy Franklin, told me that I was “not authorized” to access the account, and she couldn’t tell me anything about it.

EXCUSE ME !?!?!?!??!?!?!??!?!?!?!?

I have talked to SIX different people over there, and was actually responsible for the original screw up and now I’m not AUTHORIZED to find out what the hell is going on? Good time to decide that , folks.

Is it me, or is this just ANOTHER run around? They’ve ruin out of ways to put me off, and are now trying to tell me that all the information I’ve received has been “unauthorized” and therefore they have no obligation to obey it? Sailor Boy is abotu to go apeshit on them.

As soon as he wakes up.