AT&T Told Me They Could Have Fixed Our Service on Their Own, But Were Waiting for Me to Call

I just got off my cell phone with AT&T about our land line being dysfunctional since last Friday (this is the third or fourth outage occasion in the last 6 months). I was told that the line would be fixed by Thursday. When I hunted down a live sales rep to address the matter of crediting our account, he told me that it would not be problem because the disrupted time would be filed when their tech fixed the line.

I told him, "Well don't you need to know how long the line has been out for us?"

He said, "Sir, we will because we can look in our system and see when the service was disrupted."

I replied, "So, are you saying that AT&T could have found the problem and fixed it on Friday?"

He said, "Yes, sir, but we wait for customers to call before responding to the problem."

That gives a whole new meaning to "customer service." AT&T: being proactive is just not a part of the equation.

Disclaimer: The exchange is paraphrased from my own memory, rather than being a verbatim transcipt. I'm sure AT&T has the conversation actually recorded for "quality assurance purposes" and plausible deniability.