Welcome to My U-verse

On January 2, we had the new AT&T U-verse installed in our home.  I can remember the day, because my wife was still on break from her job and my son was not back to school yet, so I stayed at home that morning to hang with them and answer any questions the installer might have.  It was an enjoyable moment for me because I remember sitting with my wife on the sofa as we waited for the installer to show up and how great our conversation was that morning.

The upgrade from our one little dish and standard receiver, to a DVR which records four channels at one time and two more receivers in other rooms, along with a faster Internet connection, was our Christmas gift to each other.  We had finally succumbed to the peer pressure from our friends and were upgrading to the DVR, a decision they assured us would change our lives.

I’m not sure our lives have changed much, but we do enjoy the DVR.  It’s very nice to fast forwarded through the commercials and to watch shows faster then we would normally watch them.

All of this would be so great if the system we were given would just work properly.  Enter frustration!  We started noticing problems a few weeks after the installation.  At first the picture on the TV would just freeze up for a minute or two and would only happen a couple of times a week.  We could live with that.  In fact we barely even noticed it.  But over the past six weeks the barely noticeable problem has turned into a nightmare of a mess.  We can’t even enjoy TV anymore, because the picture freezes every few minutes.  You end up missing more of the show than you get to watch.

It’s not like we haven’t reported the problem.  We’re now on our fourth installer coming out to take a look tonight.  We’ve changed routers, and had every connection checked throughout our house more than once.  When are they going to get a clue that it’s a problem on the outside of the house and not on the inside?

I feel like we’ve been very patient through this whole process, giving them multiple chances to get this fixed.  We don’t want to switch back to Dish, because we feel this is the best deal going right now and we’re confident that eventually they’ll get this fixed and we’ll be happy.  All the AT&T representatives have been extremely nice all the way down to the sales person who came to my door a few days before Christmas and signed me up.  I’m just trying to understand at what point does being nice become bad customer service.  I’m pretty sure we could continue this little dance for the rest of this year.  We can continue to be patient, they can continue to be nice, but we can still end up with our problem not fixed.  At some point AT&T has to get this right and show that their customer service can actually follow through and in the end the problem can be fixed and the customer “me” can be happy.  Right now I’m not happy, I’m frustrated, and when I angrily payed my bill yesterday I wasn’t feeling very satisfied that the price I was paying for my service was equal to what I had received.  At some point in this process I’m expecting AT&T to make good on their services and show me that they really do care about their customers satisfaction.  Until then, welcome to my U-verse!